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

[Mark Tinka]

On 20/Jun/20 19:58, Gert Doering wrote:

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

We haven't done anything with them since we bought and deployed them in
2014.

They are serving their purpose quite well, and when it's time for them
to go, the Arista kicks.


> ... 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.

We run the 7508E for core switching in large PoP's, and the 7280R for
data centre access aggregation in all PoP's (this replaced our Juniper
EX4550 and EX4600 platforms).

We are very happy - but these are pure Layer 2 switching use-cases.


> 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.

You know how I feel about Broadcom chips :-).

If Arista aren't that comfortable about them, you'd do well to take them
at their word, hehe.


> (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...)

Looking at things, it's probably cheaper for you to spend money on
getting an open IGP than spending money dealing with the indecision
Cisco sometimes goes through.

Mark.

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