[c-nsp] Wanted: Picture of working 7609 - Reward if found

[Carlson Per]

Hi Neil.

> I was wondering if people could comment on the quality
> issues around the 7609. We seem to have a large number of
> problems with these boxes, some software, a lot hardware
> issues, DOA, a lot of hardware failures, random cards rebooting. 

We have had some hardware issues as well on ours, but the software
issues has been worse. Sometimes, you could count the number of
days with out a IOS-problem in days, not weeks or months. We
are so far using the 12.1E train (nowadays 12.1(20)E3), the
12.2SX seams a bit to scary yet.

> The box has a fantastic set of features and when its working
> its excellent.

I'm not very impressed by the feature set, at least not in 12.1E.
All interesting features is first introduced in 12.0S on the GSR,
then on 12.0S/12.2S on 72/7500 and a looong time later *maybe*
on the 7600.

Being frankly, if I would redo the choice today, I would have chosen 
a smaller GSR or some other vendors equipment instead of the 7600.

> We have less than 20 and a considerable larger amount of 
> 7200 and 7500 routers and we haven't seen anywhere near
> the same number of issues with those platforms [particularly
> on the hardware side] that we see with the 7609. We also use
> 6509's and again these seem to be more robust. Any feedback
> appreciated.

We have had our shared deal with 7200 as well. We were unlucky
to get a lot of faulty NPE-400's (some memory timing problems),
and Cisco had to replace every single NPE in the network. 
Speaking of NPE's, the NSE-1 tops out as the worst product ever
released. We never (nor Cisco) found an IOS that worked stable
on those with the PXF enabled....

Per