[c-nsp] Pile on the 6509 noob

[Geoffrey Pendery]

Agreed, and this is what we do as well.
If your WAN is DS3 or smaller, 3845's work well for us.  If OC3 or
bigger, 7206VXR's have worked great for us.  We're starting to dabble
in ASR 1000's for multi-OC3 sites, and they seem promising, but we
don't have enough experience with them to fully recommend yet.

Pretty much all of these options will be cheaper, more robust, and
better supported than FlexWAN, but I don't know the details of your
specific network design and situation, so I'll just agree with Scott
that a separate router has a lot of benefits to it.


-Geoff


On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Scott McGrath <mcgrath at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Personally,
>
> The 6509 was never optimal for WAN usage it's a excellent ethernet router,
> What we have
> done is use a 7206 or similar router for WAN service and connected it to the
> 65xx via ethernet
> one this isolates your WAN circuits so in the event Zeus tosses a
> thunderbolt your way you blow
> up an inexpensive router (relatively) and the 65xx is protected due to the
> only connection
> being optical (assuming GE interfaces here).
>
> Also the 72xx has many WAN specific features in IOS which are not in the
> 65xx's code train
> or were not the last time I actively looked.
>
> - Scott
>
> Mark Tinka wrote:
>>
>> On Friday 25 September 2009 02:10:06 am CJ wrote:
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Finally, if I solved this issue, I'm wondering about the
>>> relative wisdom of using the FlexWAN card.  I want to put
>>> a PA-2DS3 in it and also a PA-MC-T3. Is this an
>>> enlightened practice?
>>>
>>
>> We've always been against trying to turn an Ethernet box into a
>> TDM/SONET/SDH device, as it's never cheap considering how much bandwidth
>> you're losing per slot relative to the investment in adding non-Ethernet
>> support as well as the kind of bandwidth you'd be getting out of it.
>>
>> It's the same thing Juniper did with their MX-FPC carrier cards, adding
>> support for SONET/SDH PIC's in the MX-series routers. I'd still find it
>> cheaper to buy a smaller box that talks Ethernet and non-Ethernet fairly
>> equally from an overall cost/benefit-perspective.
>>
>> But that's just us :-)... I'm sure a number of networks in the wild find
>> this feature quite useful, which is why the vendors continue to find ways to
>> provide support for it.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Mark.
>>
>
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