[c-nsp] Huawei instead of Cisco

[Pavel Stan]

Hi,


My first advice regarding S9300 or any other Huawei box is not to trust
any lab test they might propose to you,  but get one demo box and place
it in the target live environment, if possible.

In particular for S9300, it's a surprisingly well done
non-oversubscribed 10G IP-switch with hardware MPLS support, but no
match for 76xx, so be sure to ask for a much lower price. S9300 is done
using technology from the NE40 series ( not the NE40-E / NE80-E, who is
positioned on same level with 7600 and also has the LPUF and LPUG cards
that try to compete with ES+ cards ).

Depending on your desired position on your customer's network, things
could go well with this box for running L2 carrier services, as EoMPLS /
TE looks good on them. For IPv4/v6 routing things get nasty, even if
they have LC that support 512k FIB, QPPB, enough LFIB space. The
problems that you should lookup with these things are the CPU processing
limits, as it seems that the MPU, as they call it, is somehow too week
for holding even a decent flow of control-plane traffic, so you might
want to keep things simple there.


>From the operational part, you must pray that you don't need to interact
with their post-sales support team, as they are unable to help you on
complex problems or give you info on "what happens with this packet
inside the box" questions. They tend to escalate this problems to their
over-worked suicidal R&D guys.

Documentation is useless most of the times and looks like it was google
translated from mandarin.

For the software, try to get them to give you an image that has GA
status with at least one maintenance release ( for ex. SRD2 ) as they
try to push newer feature releases on to small customers for beta-testing.


Don't trust anything they tell you but test it yourself, You would be
surprised to find that simple things you would take for granted on
Cisco/Juniper/Alcatel/etc are not implemented the way you expected.

Also, what if hear from happy GSM/WDM/SDH Huawei owners is not relevant
for IP/Ethernet/MPLS/Carrier Service, as they are totally different BUs
with different experience and strategy.

On the commercial side, they will do "ANYTHING" to sign with you, as
they are desperately trying to extend their datacom portfolio to more
than the current China Telecom, Asia and other banana republics
customers that they currently have.

 

Good luck!

--
Pavel Stan
pavel.stan at pavel.pro


Felix Nkansah 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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