[f-nsp] Ethernet router suggestion required

[Basile Bluntschli]

Hi Samit

>
> I am looking for a L2/L3 capable ethernet router with 20Gig ports in my
> core, that should do full bgp feeds from multiple upstreams w/ , IPv6
> and multicast routing, MPLS and 4byte Asn in future.  I am currently
> looking into 4 products from 4 vendor.
>
> 1. Extreme BD 1280xR
> 2. Force10 E300 (don't have MPLS but might do in future)
> 3. Foundry NetIron MLX-4
> 4. Juniper Mx240.
>
> Suggestion:
>
> 1. Price the killer
> 2. Stability and reliability
> 4. Performance
> 3. Support
>
We use all Foundry now in our core and they are really reliable L2/L3
device. As i don't know the other products i can tell you just my opinion
about the Foundry MLX-4.

2. We have some MLX-4 but we are not that happy with those. They, for the
first view, offer almost the same specifications as the XMR product range
does. But in fact there are quit some difference.

For example if you have a look at the CAM Partitioning Profiles you see that
the XMR offers you more services at the same time. What i read out of your
post the only usable profile on a MLX would be the ipv4-ipv6-2 which allows
you to use the BGP fullfeed IPv4 and the BGP fullfeed IPv6. This profile
does not support L3VPN, but you can do VLL and VPLS.

Then we suffered some problems on the MLX with the memory usage when having
a lot of BGP sessions configured. We used the MLX as a route-reflector in
our core for our edge devices. This used all of the available memory (1Gig)
on the MLX, which lead to a device who was not configurable anymore (conf t
was rejected because of insufficient memory). We then had to change the MLX
with a XMR (which has 2Gig RAM) as upgrades of the Ironware (IOS) did not
help. In future release there should be a fix for this, foundry told us. If
you have a look at the new release notes for the 3.9 Ironware there seems to
be improvement for this issue, so maybe in future the MLX will also be
capable of this...

4. But in fact also during this memory problem the device was stable and
performance was never an issue. We use the MLX and XMR with 10Gig Interfaces
and they provide line rate routing.

3. We have a direct contact at foundry where we get great support.

To make the story short my opinion is to use an XMR if you really want to
have it as a core device. MLX is fine for edge purposes.

Kind regards
Basile
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