[c-nsp] Advice on Core Swithes / Routers

[Zoe O'Connell]

On 13/01/11 10:10, Gert Doering wrote:
> Serials on a 6500 require flexwan + PA, and the flexwan is expensive
> (and I seem to remember that it's end of support, but that might be the
> flexwan1 while the flexwan2 is still supported).  I'd not go there - the
> 6500 is a great platform for ethernet stuff, but WAN stuff has always been
> "bolted to the side", with mixed-quality software support, etc.
>
> With a 7301+2960S, you can get up to 48 switched ports in 2RU, and the
> 7301 will actually do a better job at BGP+OSPF than the 6500 (because
> that's question of CPU, and the 7300 is faster).
>
> A 6500/7600 will need more space, more power, and if all you need is 
> 10/100, the much higher packet throughput for L3 stuff is likely not
> necessary...

Just out of interest, do you not find that having switches uplinked at
1Gb/s unnecessarily limits the throughput of the solution? Having 48
ports but only being able to guarantee provision of 500Mb/s off it is
somewhat limiting. 6500/7600s have worked well for this if you're only
using Serial for access and not core circuits - we have stacks of old
7200VXRs we can use for that.

For future small data centre deployments, the ASR1002s look nice due to
their ability to handle 10GigE, (Enough for two diverse links to other
core devices plus a 10GigE link for local Layer 2) we've not had need to
look at anything larger for a few years now.