[f-nsp] Experiences with netiron MLX-platform

[Jason J. W. Williams]

Hi Gunther,

Is the CAM the same as FIB on the MLX? Only reason I ask is it seems
like the FIB was rated at 512K routes. We're thinking about getting
one of these, so I was just curious if my numbers were wrong?

Thanks in advance,
J

---------- Reply ----------

Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 17:09:21 +0200
From: "Gunther Stammwitz" <gstammw at gmx.net>
Subject: Re: [f-nsp] Experiences with netiron MLX-platform
To: "'Jayabalan Subramanian'" <jb at netmagicsolutions.com>,
        <foundry-nsp at puck.nether.net>
Message-ID: <20060921150304.6E9573300A7 at server.edu-search.de>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="iso-8859-1"

Hello JB,

Well... There's not much to report which is a good thing though.
The box is working very well. In our case we're running with 3 full bgp
views and a total of 10 bgp neighbors as well as a few ospf-links. Cpu load
is almost zero all the time and even several route flaps at the same time
don't let the mlx start sweating.
There was one minor software bug I encountered: the output of traceroute was
printed to the ssh console only after finishing the traceroute which was
nasty but nothing to worry about. It has been fixed and I'd call this system
really stable. With the old big irons there were some software issues in the
past but the MLX code seems to be far more stable.

Oh there is a limitation regarding the amount of bgp communities one can set
but this will be fixed or has already been fixed in the latest software
version due to my feature request.

In our case the support is being done by a local foundry partner and
response times as well as competence are both excellent.

We're now going to order four more boxes - some of them with 10GIG - since
we're satisfied and the cost-performance-ratio is really good.


You should pay attention to the fact that the MLX can only do Ethernet and
no SDH/SONET-Stuff but Ethernet is what people are using nowadays.

If you'd ask me... Go ahead and get a MLX :-) The 7600 has some tics
regarding the amount of routes it can handle. The small sup will only do
~230 in the fix and one needs to buy the larger one which is really
expensive. The mlx in contrast has a very stable fondry-direct-routing
system with cam-aggregation but hey: the cam is large enough for 1M routes
anyway so I wouldn't expect any problems in the future.


Best regards,
Gunther