[f-nsp] NetIron MLX-4 vs Juniper MX240

[Samit]

Hi,

Could you little bit elaborate more about the "advanced feature" which
is lacking in MLX but available in MX?

Thanks,

Regards,
Samit


Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 07:21:35AM -0400, Scott T. Cameron wrote:
>> Some of the routing engine tasks done on the SRX series are really,
>> really slow. I have my SRX series taking a full route table from my
>> upstream providers today on BGP.  This process can take about 5
>> minutes to complete.
>>  Obviously, this is insane.
> 
> Heh yes SRX is painfully slow. I have an SRX210 in my basement for my 
> home connectivity and it takes a good 30 seconds to commit even a basic 
> config. We run MX's with 10k+ line configurations, a heavy dose of 
> commit scripts, and on-commit RE sync, and it only takes around 10 
> seconds at maximum (on RE-2000).
> 
>> How fast are the Juniper MX series at taking / injecting routes?  How is the
>> failover convergence?
> 
> The juniper-nsp list is probably a better place for a detailed
> discussion on this. Generally speaking Foundry is very "lightweight", so
> it tends to perform quite well on CPU intensive tasks like this, but at
> the expense of features and functionality. Feature-wise there is
> absolutely no comparison, Foundry gets stomped hands down, but like I
> said if you run a simple network and don't need advanced features
> Foundry can become interesting based on price and the ability to
> reliably deliver line-rate traffic (something that can't be said for
> 6500/7600 :P).
> 
>> For the CLI, I'm not sure that I like JunOS better than the IOS clone. 
>> My former career was entirely Cisco, so the IOS clone is like an old,
>> familiar friend for me. I have more or less gotten over the learning
>> curve with JunOS, though.  And I do like it is a familiar FreeBSD
>> system underneath, even allowing you to go in to a shell.
> 
> Once you go JUNOS you can't go back. There are things we do with policy
> statements and commit scripts that are worth their weight in gold, that
> couldn't be duplicated under IOS let alone under Foundry if their lives
> depended on it. But the learning curve is steep, and for people who are
> more comfortable with IOS-like CLI Foundry can provide an acceptable
> solution. For my needs (running a complex network) we found Foundry L3
> to be completely unworkable, and had to pull them. But we turned around
> and sold our MLX's to a customer who had far simpler needs and they've
> been quite happy. It entirely depends on your network and your needs.
> 
>> Some of their "studies" show that the MX-series routers have some trouble
>> during failover.  I am taking it with a grain of salt, just curious of
>> anyone has had those experiences.
> 
> Cisco paid those guys a lot of money to write absolutely absurd bullshit 
> about the competition they are most afraid of, and MX certainly has them 
> running scared. There have been plenty of discussions on j-nsp about 
> exactly which parts are complete and total fabrications, you might want 
> to check the archives from "Miercom".
> 
>> Last but not least, support.  Both vendors have terrible technical
>> support when you have a bug, in my experience.  I loathe having to
>> open a case.  Is it different for support on the router series?
> 
> Not that Juniper support is perfect (you'll find me ranting about it 
> quite a bit on j-nsp :P), but MX is handled by a completely different 
> support group from SRX/J-series (which is very enterprise support 
> focused, i.e. far more resources devoted to answering "RTFM" questions 
> :P).
>