[c-nsp] NCS-5501/NCS-5502 as border/core routers

[Simon Lockhart]

David,

On Wed Aug 23, 2017 at 08:19:11AM +0000, David Hubbard wrote:
> The pricing & licensing almost killed the deal before I executed it. 

It's the licensing that I'm most worried about - particularly as it doesn't
appear to be public documented.

> but on
> the 5501se, the base price only includes eight of the forty 10gig ports
> active, and none (!) of the 100gig.  You have to buy license enable kits for
> each block of additional eight 10gig ports (part NC5501-80G-SE-LIC=, $14k
> list), and a license enabler for each single 100gig port (not sure of part,
> same list price as the 8x10gig, but on a single port, yikes).  

This is worrying, but equally odd. There is no mention of this on the data
sheet that I can see, and those part numbers don't appear either on the
Cisco website, or on Cisco's Commerce web tool. The only references that
Google throws up are 3rd party sites listing them from Cisco's GPL.

> 
> If it were not for the difference between 1.3M and 2M FIB, I???d have gone
> Arista 7280R2A series (part 7280SR2A-48YC6) which is their Jericho+ platform
> and will do 1.3M routes, (48) 1/10/25gig ports, (6) 100gig that can also do
> breakout, all ports active, much lower cost.  I had an order for a bunch of
> other Cisco stuff going out and was able to get the overall numbers where I
> wanted them to be to execute the 5501???s, but had that not been the case,
> I???d likely have been buying more Arista (already use the 7280SE for
> non-edge roles) and seeing how long the 1.3M routes would last.

Arista is definitely a competitor I'd consider - in the "Internet Scale" L2
switch market, they seem to be becoming a strong contender.
 
> If you???re considering the 5502se, which is significantly more expensive
> than 5501se of course, you may want to look at Arista???s 7280CR2K (the K is
> important).  I believe that 30 or 60-port 100gig device can do 2M and I???d
> be shocked if it were not much more cost effective than the 5502se. 

Sounds good - would be hard to be more expensive than the list price for the
5502SE - although I'm told by my Cisco AM that there are some 'amazing' deals
to be had on the NCS-5500 range. I'll have to talk to my friendly Arista
reseller again.

Many thanks for the insight,

Simon