[c-nsp] ASR-100x intro

[Charles Sprickman]

Hello all,

Long ago, I used to be pretty good at digging up information outside of cisco.com on their product lineup and what sort of real-world performance to expect, what the gotchas were on each platform, and all that other stuff you have to find outside of the sales channel.

We're tentatively shopping around, and I'm looking for that sort of information on the ASR lineup.  The 1002 and 1002-X look very interesting on paper, but I'm not finding much about what folks in a small service provider role have to say about them.  We're at the point where everything is ethernet now, so our 7206 with an NPE-G2 is feeling pretty silly.  Some of the ASR stuff seems to be in the used channel already, which is nice (I'd rather have two used than one new, FWIW).

I have no clue about the "new" IOS these things run.

I have no clue what the total cost is once you start buying software keys and whatnot to unlock additional throughput.

We've also been talking with Juniper, as the MX series looks interesting.  I was actually warned by the SE about an issue I'd seen on juniper-nsp regarding a bottleneck between the RP and the line cards when loading a ton of routes (ie: when router boots and starts sucking down routes from bgp neighbors).  The raw throughput is advertised as being much higher than similarly-priced ASR stuff.

Anyhow, if anyone has some pointers to sites/blogs I've missed where people that work in the SP business actually talk about this sort of gear, please point me to them.

Thanks,

Charles