[c-nsp] ASR920 is a ticking timebomb (CSCvk35460)

[James Jun]

> > Anyone else run the NCS540 in the Edge role and are there any major limitations except the 128K ipv4 prefix limit? 
> 
> That Broadcom chipset put me off of the NCS540.

That's what concerns me too.

One of the other reasons we're looking to phase out ASR920s over time is the small
buffers.

We also had an issue when oversubsribing shared on-chip buffers on the box (by using child 
policy-map to assign 100% queue on all ports), where sometimes, probably when buffers
are exhausted, it freezes packet transmission on ports after a while, thus causing an
outage.  We ended up removing that policy-map and are now only allocating 512KiB queue-limit
per 1G port to prevent exhaustion.


> 
> The MX204 is an MPC7 line card in a rack, so it will do the full whack
> in FIB, which is nice. If they can maintain that capability for an
> "MX204-lite", we have a proper winner. My fear is that if Juniper were
> to have a smaller cousin of the MX204 for dense, 1Gbps access, they may
> go Broadcom, in which case they will position an ACX5000 of sorts, which
> doesn't move the needle anywhere.

If MX204-Lite or whatever it'd be called is also derived from run-to-completion EA-Trio,
then indeed, that will be the clear winner here.

I suppose MX104 with decent discount may be an option, but control-plane is an issue.

James