[c-nsp] Typhoon support on XRe

[James Jun]

On Mon, May 01, 2017 at 11:11:54PM +0200, Christian wrote:
> The tomahawk based card is not much cheaper. Our traffic didn't increase 
> much over the last years, so it's hard to effort these expensive high 
> dense cards at the moment. So pretty bad time to invest into Cisco gear 
> here at the moment.

I agree, I think Typhoon cards are here to stay for a long time on many networks,
including ours.  We have a bunch of these ranging from MOD80 to 24x10GE-TR and I'm
certainly not going to get rid of them for the new Tomahawk cards.

My only issue with 24x10G Typhoon card is that the thing draws like 900W of power
to drive 24x 10G ports loaded full with optics, though it is a powerful line card
indeed, with every port mapped to NPU PPS rating.  

But if you're considering a new deployment of ASR9K today, I would engage your
account team and take a look at the MOD200-TR-RL-B=.  The RL-B is Tomahawk MOD200
rate limited to 200Gig configuration, at a price point that is little higher than
where MOD80 used to be.  So if you're a former MOD160 user considering a new ASR9K
kit today, MOD200-RL is actually a price reduction.

Another one that seems interesting is MOD400-CM-BUN bundle with 100Gig license
included? (I think?)  I'll have to check it out, could be an alternative option to
the new 24x10G/1G card for smaller licensed density with double the NPU count.


> 
> >So that's one school of thought. On the other hand, I personally expect
> >QNX to live on a lot longer, in order to provide support for the droves
> >of 9001s bought by big customers for aggregation work.

I love the 9001's and I hope the 32-bit stays alive as well.  

But I don't know... why does this sound like 7600 vs. 6500 back in the day? :P

After all, once the 9901 is out, what purpose is there for 9001 to stick around
for new revenue opportunities?  Future seems bleak for 9001.

To be honest, MX104 seems kind of same story on Juniper land, it was cool to
see modular RE back when it was introduced and product seemed to have good 
potential on design overall, but at this point, I think it's best to wait for
the upcoming Summit1/3 routers or get the big boy MX.


> 
> RSP440 is going EOS this summer, so not much left to chose from. :-/

RSP880-RL is available now as stop-gap for the 440 going EOS, and that is what
Cisco lists on EOS notice to migrate to, and you'll find that pricing won't be
an issue if you were already budgeting for RSP440.  If you got existing 440s, 
I would keep them, as EOL date is much farther out than EOS.  Buy RSP880-RL
if you're doing a new greenfield deployment, but keep the 440s in service until
support dies out with the EOL milestone.  At least that's how we're planning here.

I am glad we never got any RSP440-LT -- talk about a short-lived product :D


James