[c-nsp] PA-MC-8T1

[Gert Doering]

Hi,

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:09:12PM -0600, Graham Wooden wrote:
> Just wanted to confirm before I spend the money ....
> 
> I am looking at the WAN card PA-MC-8T1 for some T1 aggregation points,
> inserted into FlexWAN/6500.  As I am reading the data sheet for it, it looks
> like it can do non-channelized connections, right?  Need to consolidate down
> some non-fractional/channelized T1s...

I have no experience with the PA-MC-8T1, but we use a lot of MC-8E1s in
our network.  It can do "full rate" E1s (1984 time slots) and of course
sub-rate.  The total number of interfaces is limited to a number that I
forgot, so you can't do 8 x 30 DS0 interfaces - what we did at the time
was to run 6x full rate and 2x channelized E1s on them.

Now for the FlexWAN: seriously reconsider whether you want to go there,
or whether you want to get a used 7200 instead and just put it on top 
of the 6500, giving you 4 or 6 PA slots for the price of a single FlexWAN
with two slots.  The problem with the FlexWAN is not that it wouldn't work,
but that Cisco has a nasty habit of discontinueing support for 6500 blades
that are less-than-mainstream in new IOS trains - FlexWAN is already 
unsupported in most recent IOS versions (SXH, I think, dropped FW support)
and you would need to use "enhanced FlexWAN".

(I certainly can understand that old hardware needs to die at some point,
but if all you have is a 6500, and you need SXH/SXI to support one half
of your hardware, and 'no more recent than SXF' to support the *other*
half, you're sort of stuck in "I hate Cisco" land.  If you have multiple
baskets, it's much easier to balance IOS reality vs. real world needs)

((I also think the FlexWAN was a very nice idea.  Fortunately enough, 
for the longest time it was just too expensive to be more interesting 
than "just get another 7200" - and when we saw that it was already being
dropped, we congratulated ourselves for not having fallen into every single
6500 BU trap))

gert

-- 
USENET is *not* the non-clickable part of WWW!
                                                           //www.muc.de/~gert/
Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert at greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-35655025                        gert at net.informatik.tu-muenchen.de
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 305 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/attachments/20091126/a3d67885/attachment.bin>