[c-nsp] Redundancy options for Dual Home Devices using EoMPLS or VPLS

[Mark Tinka]

On Tuesday, January 14, 2014 10:27:44 PM Saku Ytti wrote:

> I took a look at ME2600X recently, looks like
> forwarding-plane is StrataXGS Triumph BCM56624 and
> control-plane is QorIQ P2020.

Yes, forwarding ASIC is the BCM56624, which will handle all 
ports at line rate given it's a 112Gbps ASIC.

However, since Cisco only have 4x uplink 10Gbps ports, they 
artificially oversubscribe the platform since the downlink 
ports are 44x in total.

In fairness, if you're deploying it in an FTTH scenario, I'd 
hardly worry about this. 1Gbps into every consumer home with 
LACP on all the uplinks, is more than sufficient, and enough 
to beat GPON any day for years to come.

> Forwarding-plane seem very capable. And you actually can
> configure MPLS on it, LDP gets up, CEF gets populated,
> even platform specific commands imply HW is programmed
> for labels. Didn't push any traffic through it, I'll try
> to find time/motivation in next few weeks to test if it
> actually work (not that I'm going to use MPLS on it, as
> it's not listed as being supported so that's big no-no)

That is my conclusion as well. The hardware certainly can 
support MPLS to a great extent. What extent, not really 
sure.

But it doesn't look like they plan to support it, so if the 
commands are present, it could be a carry-over of PI code 
that may get de-beaked in future releases. 

Personally, I still prefer the ME3600X for business-type 
services, and would deploy it as such; where the ME2600X 
would be more for consumer-type services. Otherwise, what 
would the difference between the two be, from a commercial 
perspective, for Cisco?

> But why did Cisco see this much trouble with MPLS, unless
> they planned to start supporting it? And they pretty
> much have to, if they want to compete with SAS-M.

To be fair, I think the ME3600X/3600X-24CX/3800X + AS901/903 
are more than sufficient for service provider and business 
services now. All Cisco need to work on is adding scale 
without adding cost (as we discussed a while back on this 
list).

While I see a lot of folk deploying the ME2600X in Layer 2-
only Metro-E scenarios as well (the box has about 90% of the 
EVC capability of its brothers in the family), I still think 
it is most optimized for FTTH deployments. The merchant 
silicon in here will certainly help in making it affordable 
for such deployments.

Mark.
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