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

[Debbie Fligor]

On May 7, 2010, at 6:21, Scott T. Cameron wrote:

> 
> On the MLX side of things.  With a rather large Foundry switching environment, I and my team are very comfortable on that platform.  The switches just work, and the strangest problem I have seen interop problems with a Cisco -- and I blame Cisco for that.  We have had some struggles using the Foundry ServerIron due to a few bugs here and there.  I do, however, expect that a full layer3 stack is significantly less complicated of code than what the ServerIron is able to do, so should have less bugs.
> 


Our backbone (core and distribution layers) are MLX routers (I'm at the Urbana campus). Our regional network that connects the three campuses are also MLX routers. I would not suggest you assume fewer bugs than you've seen in the ServerIrons.

We see much fewer headaches with their L2 devices typically than with their L3 devices, but we've moved to HP over the years for price/performance for most of our L2 access ports.  Our experience with BGP and OSPF is that those protocols are pretty solid.  ACLs are buggy, at least if you use them on a ve instead of a physical port, and PIM/MSDP is one of those things you keep your fingers crossed about with every single software upgrade, hoping that they fix more things than they break and that they will move forward in being fully standards compliant. mBGP (for multicast) is hit and miss, at least on our MPLS based regional network.  Some of that is config choices we made, some is their (apparent) lack of QA for anything multicast.

they are fast hardware switching, and they reboot fast though and they're usually pretty good about fixing problems once you finally nail down what the problem is. I'll echo what someone else said, if your needs are simple, they'll probably work fine.  I can't honestly recommend them if you run PIM or MSDP however, that has been (and still is) a nightmare to keep working correctly.

I can't compare to the Juniper MX, we've not got any of those.

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-debbie
Debbie Fligor, n9dn       Network Engineer, CITES, Univ. of Il
email: fligor at illinois.edu          <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/fligor>