[c-nsp] 7200 -> 6503

[John Elliot]

Hi Guys,

We have a current network comprising of 6 POPs, each with 3750/3560's and 7200's - The 3560/3750's take trunk links from various carriers, and client tails are handed off to us as vlans. The 3560/3750's then have a portchan to the 7200's where all our L3 is done(As dot1q subints)

The 7200's all have ibgp mesh to each other, and run mpls+ospf - They also take ATM connections from carriers for DSL hand-off(LNS), and have bgp sessions to carriers for Inet access.

Majority of our clients are in vrf's that have tails terminating on multiple POPs.

The 7200's are G2's and a couple of them are doing ~500Mb/sec aggregate traffic(getting up to ~50% cpu) - Our initial thought was to replace the 7200's with ASR1000's, but we are also considering the 6503 with dual sup, run mpls/ibgp/ospf on these(For all our "internal" traffic vrfs etc), and only use the 7200's for external bgp(inet), plus LNS termination.(i.e. move away from our existing collapsed core setup)

Having never touched the 6500 range, is this a viable(better?) alternative to simply replacing the 7200's with ASR's?

Cheers.