[c-nsp] ASR-100x intro

[Charles Sprickman]

On Jan 5, 2013, at 6:54 AM, Robert Hass wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 12:09 PM, Charles Sprickman <spork at bway.net> wrote:
>> 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).
> 
> Look also at ASR 1001 not only 1002/1002-X.
> 
> ASR 1k is very good platform but quite expensive if you need to pass a
> lot of traffic.
> What features you're using ? BRAS ? IPESC ? MPLS PE ? ISP PE ? NHRP ?

Right now and for the foreseeable future we don't need anything fancy, with one exception, which I'll save for last.

We're doing lots of ethernet aggregation - both metro-e services and DSL/EoC (delivered over GigE, one vlan per customer, no PPPoe - straight bridging).  The people on the other end of these circuits are all customers, we're not an enterprise with branch offices, so many features like IPSEC are totally useless at this point.

On the "core" side (we are really too small to think about having core vs. edge gear) we will likely never go beyond 3 transit providers with full BGP feeds, and as our traffic ramps up some more, there are probably a handful of private peering opportunities.  IPv6 support is a necessity.

The one area where I would like to be more "high touch" is in traffic shaping and QoS.  Often times we'll have a metro-ethernet customer who wants 50Mb/s and our metro-e provider can only provide an unthrottled 100Mb/s connection.  The brute-force shaping I can do on the NPE-G2 is not very nice, and it tends to kill VoIP.  Customers tend to balk at installing any substantial CPE that could do shaping on their end.  Any gear that offered a drop-dead easy way of saying "cap traffic on this vlan to X Mb/s but reserve and prioritize Y Mb/s for VoIP" would add serious value.  How exactly one would accomplish that for customer-bound traffic where you don't know if DSCP values have been stripped upstream, well that's tough, although our VoIP provider has offered to setup a private peering connection, so being able to prioritize anything headed to or from their port would be nice.

All I know is that every time we've lurched towards just being a "dumb pipe", there's always one or two customers where we'd have a sale if we could accommodate their scenario where they need a more high-touch solution.

Thanks,

Charles

> Rob