[c-nsp] Flow tools

[Phil Mayers]

On 18/01/12 14:07, Nick Hilliard wrote:
>
> Gert, hardware upgrades need to happen; otherwise we would all be stuck
> using bus interfaces designed in the early 1990s.  Nobody likes paying for
> upgrades, but Cisco's 67xx line cards have been properly supported since
> 2003 - 9 years ago.  If you bought them then on a 4Y depreciation basis,
> you would now have had 5 years of free operation.   In a fast-moving world
> like networking, this really is unusually stable and a very good
> investment.  Moreover, they still have good resale value.

I tend to agree with this. Our sup720 have been really REALLY good 
boxes, with exceptionally good lifetime.

In fact, with the exception of a couple of features (IPv6 uRPF springs 
to mind) and the low 10gig port density, they still compare favourably 
with current-generation kit for certain workloads.

I tend to think of them as the swiss army knife. You *could* buy a large 
array of random different boxes from other vendors, but why bother?

That said: the sup2T would have been a KILLER box if it had been 
delivered on time. Now: not so much. The slow delivery and presence of 
the N7k give me cause for concern. The "roadmap out to space year 3000" 
rings a bit false, frankly...

Also: X2. ARGH! At least you can buy the SFP+ converters.

>
> Re: DFCs, either you have distributed forwarding or you don't.  If you do,
> you have much greater forwarding capacity.  If you don't, your network will
> be cheaper to build.  Shifting bits costs money.

Couple of points.

First: 6708. One-off mistake (DFC can't be upgraded) but if you bought 
into this linecard, I imagine you'd be irate...

Second: I'm curious if people are seeing prices that "make sense" for 
the DFC4 upgrade parts for 67xx linecards. They were about 50% more than 
the equivalent DFC3 parts. When we costed out the upgrade of our main 
core routers to sup2T, the DFC parts made it quite pricey, and pushed us 
to look at "more radical" options.