[nsp] PPPoE LNS - Redback, Juniper, or Cisco?

[sv]

Hi Jay,

just my 2 cents per each device:

Jay Greenberg wrote:

>Hi Guys, we're currently supporting about 4-10 thousand DSL customers on
>2 Redback SMS 1800 LNS devices, and we need to upgrade to something
>bigger.
>
>For anyone with experience, could I please have your take on the
>following platforms, including cost effectiveness and functionality
>(realistic subscriber count, etc).  Also, we're potentially interested
>in hardware support for ACLs and rate limiting.
>
>Redback SMS 10000
>  
>
uhm.. ohh.. no... we had such a box but it wasnt performing well at last
at first it was kinda okay, but the more customers the more problems ie.
- bridge group problems affecting whole box performance
- >= 8000 customers it couldnt handle atm traffic well, customers didnt 
got their performance due to (i i remember correctly) design problems on 
the atm ports or Connection manager cards
(redback introduced the xCM boards and some new oc12 ports after that 
but i never used them)
- lcp state machine problems (was a bad  problems, customers got 
disconnected due to lcp req sent out randomly)
- config file size limitations (you want many pvc's ? ;-)
- pvc-on-demand creation problems (proposed to fix upper issue, but had 
some probs aswell)
- got never proposed oc12 modules
- very expensive compared to juniper erx
- 100k pppoe sessions ? marketing gag
- that binding stuff sucks (personal behaviour)
+ was the first (?) working and stable (at the beginning) bbras solution 
out there
+ had a good support team ;-)

this behaviour was seen on a sms10k with 4port oc3 port, aos 5.0.x and 
NxFE uplinks (w/o newer xCM/ATM ports)
i would personally suggest you to not use it with a larger customerbase

>Juniper ERX
>  
>
our newest toy.... (erx-1400)

+  it does what you wanna want it todo (performance, sessions)
+ virtual router support (many routers in the same box ie. for different 
purposes, xdsl, leasedline, vpn's, management ...)
+ 32k user / 16k active pppoe sessions (which it handles perfect!)
+ cli = cisco like
+ you can use macro/scripts todo stuff like pvc creation and other things
+ session shaping works well (policy-list & rate-limite profile)
+ acl's works well (hardware assist)
+ a working lcp implementation
+ CBF: (connection based forwarding) splits traffic based on protocol to 
user defined interfaces (ie. pppoe and ip over the same atm circuit) 
very cool ;-)
+ very good and fast support
+ very cheap (cost/port) compared to redback
- slow cli (focus is on customer serving not admin stuff ;-)
- it takes around 15 minutes to boot
- still no on demand pvc creation (but plenty of config size) (or is 
that an old information?)

overall a good design work done by unisphere/juniper, performance is as 
expected and as in the noted in the docs, if you
move from redback to this its like heaven ;-)

>Cisco 7200 w/NPE-G1
>  
>
hmm... if i remember correctly the 7200 is able to 1x stm-1 at line 
speed... but thats it.. dunno about new npe-g1... it was so with a npe-300

>Cisco 7300
>Cisco 6500/7600 w/NWAM 
>  
>
we thought about using it... but if i remember correctly the port costs 
was very high and port density was very limited (info: year 2000)

>Cisco 10000 ESR
>
>Thanks, group.
>  
>

np

ps: everything i noted happend really ;-|