[c-nsp] ME3800X/ME3600X/ME3600X-24CX/ASR903/ASR901 Deployment Simplification Feedback

[Leigh Harrison]

Hi there Waris,

We've got quite a few of the ME3600's deployed now, which we migrated to over and above a legacy 3750ME estate.  The big point for us was to migrate to MPLS access rather than have any spanning tree knocking about in the Core.

Favoured points from my team involves the ease of configuration and their raw speed.  Down sides are port capacity and buggy software.  

A denser system of 48 Gig ports and more 10Gb ports would assist greatly as we can fill up 24 1Gb ports quite quickly depending on which PoP the system has been built for.  We tend to ring the 3600's into ASR9K's and the more rings we buy, the more 9K 10Gb ports have to be taken up.  Additional 10Gb ports would be of great benefit to increase the capacity of each ring we build, rather than build new rings.  Our provider connections are also moving from 1Gb up to 10Gb and I need to be able to cater for this towards the Access, rather than the Core.

I would also like to see more horsepower in the systems.  We recently went to implement multicasting in VRF and ran into some odd challenges.   We have the 3600's set up for routing and are about to push 24,000 IPv4 routes.   In our busier boxes we have around 9,000 routes, so I'm more than happy with the capacity there.  However, in order to turn on 250 MDT routes, we have to drop the IPv4 routes down to 12,000.  A sliding scale would be nice for memory allocation, but in the face of having 3600's move from 30% full to 60% full in the routing table to add in a new feature, we went for a redesign of how we delivered the multicasting.

Leigh


> Hi Everyone,
> I have seen lot of good inputs on this mailer. I am collecting 
> feedback for the existing deployment challenges on the following 
> platforms so that we can address them.
> 
> -ME3800X
> -ME3600X
> -ME3600X-24CX
> -ASR903
> -ASR901
> -ME3400E

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