[c-nsp] ASR9001 Vs ASR1006

[Mark Tinka]

On 19/May/16 09:36, James Bensley wrote:

>
> More smaller boxes works well in my opinion. It comes with other
> benefits like not having to have loads of high end (costly) boxes in
> the lab.

I think it depends.

For us, we like several small boxes for peering and transit, because
they get deployed in several different geographic locations. So cost is
an issue. But also, if one site dies, another site takes over without
any trouble.

In the edge, that is a slightly different story. In the large data
centre PoP's, we use MX480 routers for our Ethernet services, and
ASR1006 routers for our non-Ethernet services. As you point out, the
MX480's can terminate thousands of customers, many of whom aren't buying
a high SLA. We distribute customers across multiple edge routers to
balance traffic as well as outage risks. If customers want near-100%
uptime, we advise them to buy two services on separate edge devices.
However, we also work hard to minimize maintenance events, and only do
them when we know low SLA customers won't be busy on the service.

For us, having too many edge routers in a data centre PoP in order to
satisfy low SLA customers does not make commercial sense, purely based
on the sheer number of customers we are dealing with. We will always
keep the number of edge routers in those sites small, but scale up
vertically, e.g., from MX480 to MX960 to MX2010, e.t.c.

But in the metro, it makes lots of sense to have several smaller boxes
distributed around since we use the ME3600X and ASR920, which are cheap
enough for this not to be an issue. Of course, in your case, using large
chassis in the metro is not going to scale commercially.

Mark.