[c-nsp] Cisco N540-ACC-SYS ipv4 routes

[Mark Tinka]

On 17/Jul/20 00:53, Phil Bedard wrote:

> Fair enough.   Every vendor has gone through their own pain with the older midplane systems in having to swap out chassis multiple times to get to higher speeds. Thankfully with the newer fabric designs we've eliminated most of that.  

Well, we started off with the MX480 back in 2014, and save for the most
recent purchases in the last year, we are still running a ton of the
actual chassis' from 2014. We did buy them with the high capacity fan
trays back then, and the 264VAC power supplies too, so those haven't
changed. What has changed, in PoP's where we've needed to add MPC7E line
cards for low-scale 100Gbps use-cases, is the SCB. We started off with
the SCBE in 2014, and have that in most of the boxes that don't need the
MPC7E's. On the units with the MPC7E's, we just upgraded the SCBE's to
the SCBE2's.

The MX480 RE-S-1800x4 control planes from 2014 are still running just
fine. In fact, we still buy that RE for all new MX480 deployments, today.

I'm not sure how much enhancement you'd need to make to an ASR9006 or
ASR9010 to keep it running 7+ years on. We only ever deployed the
ASR9001, which is still humming along as long as you don't use it as a
very busy peering router :-).

Also in 2014, we bought the CRS-B chassis, which was the one built to
support between 400Gbps - 800Gbps per slot. Cisco decided to cap it off
at 400Gbps/slot when they moved on with the NCS 6000, even though they
did tell us that it has the potential to do 800Gbps with no issue.

We started it off as a CRS-3 (140Gbps/slot), and most of our PoP's still
run it in that configuration. For the PoP's where we need 100Gbps
support, we upgraded them to the CRS-X (so a new 400Gbps fabric and
slot-specific FP-X's). The good news is that the CRS-X is backward
compatible with CRS-3 (and CRS-1) line cards, so that mix works well for
us, since the PoP's where we need 100Gbps ports also still run 10Gbps
ports in CRS-3 line cards.

We still have the same RP's in our CRS routers from 2014 (1.73GHz
Dual-Core Intel Xeon, 12GB RAM, 2x 32GB SSD drives). Solid control
planes, those.

So for me, Cisco not EoL'ing or EoS'ing the CRS-X (or its line cards),
but still "nudging" you away from it is simply bad form. We still have
anywhere from 4 - 6 slots free on each of these routers (so 8 - 12 per
PoP), so the room for growth is plenty, and there is no way I'm going to
put my refresh in Cisco's hands after this behaviour from them. We saw
what happened with a bunch of other boxes that came out, and then simply
disappeared - the NCS 6000 being the most recent.

So I have no confidence that someone at Cisco will some day get bored
and decide that the 8000 platform was not the right approach. No
confidence at all! And I told our AM's the exact same thing a few weeks
ago, when they asked why they were not being considered for our core
refresh any longer. I hope they learned something, but it's hard to
teach the 500-pound gorilla in the room new tricks, so...


> Sorry was thinking 400GE to 100GE breakout.  You can certainly do 4x10GE breakouts on the various 8000s boxes and line cards.  

We've decided not to continue running our core routers on chassis-based
platforms. The current state-of-the-art suggests that you can get quite
a lot of density, performance and reliability from fixed form factor
core routers, even for multi-100Gbps applications. Less space, less
power, fewer things to spare, fewer things to fail, quick and easy
installations/de-installations... what's not to love?

So as we get rid of our CRS's, only fixed form factor options are going in.

The PTX1000 is looking very good, but we are also looking at Nokia's new
SR-1. The SR-1 can be ordered either as a fixed or modular chassis, and
consumes 3U of rack space.

Exciting times.

Mark.