[c-nsp] Huawei instead of Cisco

[Rubens Kuhl]

Once upon a time, a very large operator which was previously a
Cisco+Juniper shop, bought some Huawei and a few AlcaLu routers. They
forgot to notice that Huawei followed original IS-IS spec (RFC 1142)
to the letter, including generating LSP Purges when receiving corrupt
announcements, which caused LSP purge/re-announcements war with all
the other routers due to a failed optic module. That was changed by
RFC 3719; Juniper and Cisco default to RFC 3719, Huawei defaults to
RFC 1142, and all three allow you to change to the other option. See
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/isis-wg/current/msg01800.html for
more on this behavior change.

It took them 3 days of an all-services outage to find the root cause.
And Huawei is not the one to blame for this IMHO, as reading the
manual and doing integration testing are operator duties. If these
costs are added to the project and Huawei still wins, why not ? But in
Cisco, Juniper or Cisco+Juniper scenarios one can leverage the tests
and bug corrections of a larger userbase. C+J are not perfect, they
run code and code is prone to errors, but you can share the pain with
more people.

But as others pointed out, in Cisco-land the ASR families are probably
better long term bets. ASR-1000 MPLS support is new but price-wise it
will probably be a good match for Huawei. So would be Juniper's new
box, MX80-48T.


Rubens



On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 8:21 PM, Felix Nkansah <felixnkansah at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A telco customer is evaluating tender proposals for next-generation Internet
> POPs planned for deployment this year.
>
> Among the bidders is Huawei, who has a very beautiful technical proposal
> document with great-looking design/platforms.
>
> They are positioning their Quidway S9300 terabit routing switch platform to
> compete (the equivalent of the Cisco ASR 9000).
>
> The customer would have loved to go with Cisco 7609s, but is contemplating
> Huawei's because of their low prices.
>
> I know Huawei is doing a good job in mobile switching and access networks,
> but do you know how well they do with their products in data/IP/BGP/MPLS
> solutions?
>
> How about the maturity of their software? Are there any hidden operational
> costs too? What is the total cost of ownership when compared to Cisco's?
>
> Thanks. Felix
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