[c-nsp] Thoughts on the ASR9902?

Mark Tinka mark at tinka.africa
Fri Oct 11 11:11:02 EDT 2024




On 10/10/24 18:20, Drew Weaver via cisco-nsp wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We bought one and regret it mightily every single day.
>
> Ours specifically had bad memory in it, it took a year before they/we figured that out, lost our SNT over that year while it was acting insane [and we couldn't deploy it] and then even after they RMA'd the router because it was faulty the entire time we owned it we were provided an insane quote to renew our SNT. Had it 15 months now, it's routed exactly zero packets.
>
> It's basically a 8 port 100GE router, all we wanted to do was configure it for 3x100GE +10x10GE per 'slice' and that was impossible, instead they advised us that if we want 6x100GE ports we should configure the slices asymmetrically [i.e. one slice 4x100GE and the other slice 2x100GE+10x10g+10x10g] but that of course reduces redundancy if you planned on using port channels across the slices [assuming that the slices fail independently of one another which wasn't our case with the bad memory as all of the ports went down at the same time even though we were advised that the two slices were independent by TAC].
>
> If I had it to do all over again I probably would've just purchased two Arista 30x100GE switches [which with the right model can also do full tables] for the same price as one 9902.
>
> If I couldn't do that I would probably just get whatever the smallest ASR99 is with 2x4 port 100GE line cards in it and just be done with it.

The value that one used to get from buying tin with vendor silicon from 
Cisco and Juniper seems to be on the rapid decline.

Given the ultra-high pressure on transit and DIA margins, and with the 
bulk of the Internet failing when the large 5 - 6 content networks have 
a sneeze, do we really need all the smarts these traditional vendors 
have been pushing, in 2024?

On the one hand, I think not.

Mark.


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