[c-nsp] Upgrading from a 7500 to 7600

[Anton Kapela]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net 
> [mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Voll, Scott
> Sent: Friday, December 29, 2006 1:51 PM
> To: Gordon Bezzina; cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
> Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Upgrading from a 7500 to 7600
> 
> My understanding is that the sup 720 is what your looking for.  The
> sup32 is more of a Closet Supervisor.

Indeed, sup32 tcam is sure to dissappoint as we draw near to 239k routes
on the public 'internets.'

> If money is not an object the WS-X6748-GE is a good 
> blade(about $15k list).

Decent indeed, but for "wan" features, I get nervous. More on that
below... 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net
> [mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Gordon Bezzina
> Sent: Friday, December 29, 2006 6:38 AM
> To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
> Subject: [c-nsp] Upgrading from a 7500 to 7600

[snip]

> 	WS-X6148-GE-TX - Is this a LAN only card?
> 	WS-X6408A-GBIC - Is this a WAN only card?

Neither are especially attractive to me for 'wide area' applications,
although my personal bias and interest in queuing controls are what
drive these remarks about the line cards you mention. 

I'd suggest if you need to care a lot about qos issues in your wan (more
than what you can do with basic CoS maps and a handful of priority
queues with weighted round-robin), look for SIP/SPA cards and the new
20G. The 20G line card seems to be the logical extension and
continuation of the OSM series of cards. In a nutshell, 20G/OSM/SIP&SPA
are 'higher touch' modules that can do 'more' with the packets moving
through them. Some of them can express very large ACL's, support funky
vlan tag remapping, QinQ direct termination, as well as thousands of
custom/priority queues for use on various subints. 

If you don't need to care about these things and only require basic
forwarding and some minimal queue features, by all means, ws-x67xx
series cards are great. The cards ones you mention specifically, I'd
suggest shying away from.
 
> 3. Multiple LAN GE (RJ45) connections. (at least 10)

Ws-x6748 if you need more than a handful of hosts doing a gig per. The
6148 is very oversubscribed (goole c-nsp, you'll see many threads on
this topic), and 67xx or even 65xx series is worth the upgrade given the
market prices for these cards at the moment. 

> and the SUP720. It is true that having the 720 it better but 
> from my requirements maybe I do not need such specs. After 

Capacity is not the issue here, the issue is the sup32 has not enough
tcam to be useful after, say, another year, or maybe less. Check up on
MLS carving and available tcam in the two supervisors to get the full
story. The short version is the sup32 will be less than useful for you
after about 240k routes, while the sup720 with PFC 3bxl or later will
deal with 900k+ routes. 

-Tk