[c-nsp] Design recommendation from Cisco

[CiscoNSP List]

Hi Everyone,


Received a draft proposal/bom from Cisco for a new "core"...we currently run a bunch of ASR920's/ME3600's/ASR1Ks, utilising the 10G ports on ASR920's for interpop...obviously these are limited, so more an more ASR920's are being purchased purely for 10G...not ideal, so proposed design was to have a true "core(P)", interconnected at 10+Gb, with ASR920's hanging of these as true PEs...The NCS5001/5501 was looking like a very good option for us...small footprint, good port density....but very new.


Our CEO became very friendly with Cisco (As you'd expect, Cisco saw a significant sales opportunity), and believed we needed asr9Ks for SDN (That is his vision...full SDN, one touch provisioning type thing)...I informed him of the size of the 9Ks(Phyical), the price, the line cards, the licensing, and that the 9K would be beyond overkill for our use-case (We sell 70-80% L3VPN to business...no home users....primarily vrf, managed firewall...vanilla stuff)...we are just reaching the point were 1G Interpops are not adequate.


I had one meeting with Cisco, and they were certainly pushing the 9K barrow, and hard...saying that we needed to run 9Ks at each pop, with ncs5Ks as satellites


I asked why we needed 9Ks over 5501's as a "P" box, and they stated that the 9Ks are far more feature rich, and can hold massive number of routes - 8million...I asked what features do the 9Ks have that the 5501's dont...we do not do anything exotic, we have no need for our P boxes to hold 8million routes in Fib...the 5501's can support 1-2 mill, which is more than enough for our use case....we would have transit edge routers holding the full table(s)....I cannot see a compelling reason to spend 10 times the amount of money on a box for features we dont need....but they kept pushing the 9K (Its "SDN ready"), so I asked them how is the NCS not "SDN ready", which they responded...Its a very new device, and features from the 9K will take quite some time to be released on the NCS....anyway, they have sent through a "proposal", which I found quite funny.....there design is to run a collapsed core at each pop(So the ASR9K is P/PE)....either a single 9906 or 9010 (Fully redundant, dual RSP), with NCS5K's hanging of each on as satellites...theyve also proposed dual A9K-MOD200-SE's with 2 x A9K-48x10G-1G-SE....those with 9Ks will know how much those cost...insanely expensive.


I get that Cisco are wanting to make as big a sale as possible, but the design they have proposed is just bad....a single(redundant RSP/power etc) 9K per pop....we have typically one pop per "state"....every customer in a given state would then reside on the 9K (As they are P/PE)...so any issue with them, and maintenance(XR upgrade etc), we would take down every customer in an entire state...I just am bemused at there design choice....Ive never used a 9K, but how is this a "good" design, and more importantly a wise investment.....lol, sure it will future proof our bandwdth needs for quite a few years...but it is a step backwards in my eyes from a design perspective....collapsed cores are horrible to maintain.....Im meeting with them at ciscolive, so cant wait to hear what they have to say.


Cheers