[c-nsp] Advice Needed on CIsco Equipment

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Mon, 18 Oct 2004, Richard J. Sears wrote:

> I an planning on deploying an additional backbone router away from my
> main datacenter.
>
> I will be bringing in 4 or 5 gig-e connections to the router and then
> sending a gig-e connection about 150 miles away to a Cisco 12060.

Is someone providing you a 'lit' gig-e connection over this distance, or 
are you lighting it yourself using dark fiber?  If this is being done with 
dark fiber, there will need to be optical regens every so often on the 
span in order to shoot light that distance.  That's something your fiber 
provider would need to weigh in on.

> I utilize 12060's and 6509's running the SUP720 engines locally in my
> data center, but I think both of those may be overkill for what I am
> trying to accomplish.
> [snip]
> I am looking for a recommendation on a Cisco router that will handle
> this. I need to have redundant engines and power supplies for this as
> well. It will be doing BGP with all connections.

Will you be carrying full Internet routes on all of those connections?

What else would this router be doing besides BGP and moving a few fundred 
Mb/s of traffic on each interface?

> I have never had much luck with the 75xx series Cisco equipment running
> the RSP4+ engines and trying to get any reasonable bandwidth out of
> the gig cards, so I am looking for ideas.

At a minimum I'd use a 6000 or 6500 with Sup-2/MSFC2s, all fully populated 
with RAM.  I agree that the 7500s are probably not up to the task.

Next step up would be a 7600, which is basically a 6500 with Sup720s 
anyway.

If you're entertaining other vendor solutions, a Juniper M20 would probably
handle this without too much trouble, though it won't be much/any cheaper 
than one of the platforms above, if capex is a primary driver in your 
decision.  You could get away with an M10, but the M10 doesn't have 
redundant routing engines.

jms