[c-nsp] Devil's Advocate - Segment Routing, Why?

[Gert Doering]

Hi,

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 07:42:31PM +0200, Mark Tinka wrote:
> On 19/Jun/20 17:26, Gert Doering wrote:
>
> We bought the C6880-X for our core switch back in 2014. It's still
> humming, running plain old IOS.

The 6880/6840 products were promising at that time, but the pricing made
it uninteresting.  So we kept our 6506Es for a time...

> The upgrade path is Arista for this. I'm not sure what switching is
> doing over at Cisco, these days.

... and then went to Arista 7050SX2/SX3 for the "edge things" (small
routing table, lots of 10G/25G ports, small power draw, EVPN/VXLAN).

Nice stuff like the JSON RPC API, which is nice to work with and 
amazingly *fast* (compared to JunOS commit times...).  And, most important,
a good TAC and a company interested in listening to their customers.


I'm a bit annoyed that the 7050SX* do not have MPLS-P support (because 
we have MPLS PEs that basically "live behind" the 7050SX, and now need 
to have vlans *through* them, to reach a MPLS P router).  

I do understand that the BRCM Trident is fairly limited wrt MPLS handling, 
so Arista decided "better no MPLS than something which is not enough 
for people" - unfortunately for us, because we only want "LDP and 
single-label swap/pop", but I can accept the technical arguments to 
some extent.


(As a side note, changing our network from EIGRP to OSPF for IPv4 did
not come for free, so I would have much preferred to stay in my self-
chosen vendor lock-in with Cisco.  But Cisco has gone insane these days,
and new boxes like the NCS5500 come *without* EIGRP support.  So they
really do not want us customers locked in...)

gert

-- 
"If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you 
 feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted 
 it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor."
                             Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert at greenie.muc.de
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