[c-nsp] Cisco Nexus 9300 for CORE

[adamv0025 at netconsultings.com]

> Robert Hass
> Sent: Friday, April 26, 2019 2:36 PM
> 
> Hi
> I need to build new core network. We have 6 site's in different cities.
All cities
> are connected over 100G (provided by ISP).
> 
> I just thinking about N9K-C93180YC-FX and N9K-C93240YC-FX2 switches.
> - both supports 6 and 12 x 100G ports which I will use to inter-site
> connectivity (core links)
> - they supports MACsec on 100G - I will use it to encrypt my core links
> - each inter-city link is around 500 miles
> - most of downlink ports will be 10G and 1G
> 
> Any potential problems with this platform for that purpose ?
> Buffers are very low - just 40MB. Maybe I should look at Cisco NCS or
other
> Cisco platform ?
> 
> I'm looking for some experience/recommendations.
>
It's hard to make a recommendation knowing very little about the intended
setup.
I guess you're looking at 2 nodes in each city and some partial 100GE mesh
between?
Is the load going to be uniformly distributed across all links or there
might be chokepoints -calling for some traffic-engineering possibilities? 
Do you expect the usual 50ms failover times in the core (not sure if LFA is
supported in nexus9k?)
Is the network all IP or MPLS? (MPLS means versatility, or just more
operational options in general) -nexus9k supported only static mpls last
time I checked.

There's NCS5500 but also a cheaper NCS540/560 -but I could not get much out
of this community on the latter, but that is data too (not much operational
exposure yet, is how I read that).

adam