[c-nsp] Thoughts on the ASR9902?

[Drew Weaver]

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Tinka <mark at tinka.africa> 
Sent: Friday, October 11, 2024 11:11 AM
To: Drew Weaver <drew.weaver at thenap.com>; 'Shawn L' <shawn at rmrf.us>; 'Cisco Network Service Providers' <cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net>
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Thoughts on the ASR9902?

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

> 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.
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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.
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Yeah, it sometimes almost feels as though traditional vendors are hastening the [for lack of a nicer term] enshittification of the Internet to their own detriment in a short term vs long term sense.

It has to suck for them that the aforementioned 5-6 content networks basically side stepped them entirely but we know why they did it.

 But I also don't think Broadcom is here to save anyone. So we're kind of stuck. Sadly.

-Drew