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

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 10:29:32PM +0545, Samit wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Could you little bit elaborate more about the "advanced feature" which
> is lacking in MLX but available in MX?

Well for example, MPLS IP traffic engineering. MLX/XMR is missing nearly
every feature that would be necessary to do IP TE in a complex service
provider network, its MPLS is basically only useful for doing some
simple transport services, meanwhile MX has one of the best MPLS
implementations available anywhere. If you don't need MPLS or you don't
need TE than it really doesn't matter to you. If on the other hand you
run a complex network TE can save you millions in circuit costs, and
there is absolutely no comparison between the two products.

Another example would be complex BGP policies. For example, we use
Juniper commit scripts and netconf to automatically build all manner of
BGP policies (auto per-ASN bgp communities, lots of ibgp cross-region
policies, etc), providing automation that saves us many thousands of man
hours that other large networks have to put into maintaining their
network. Foundry doesn't even support route-map continue, so it is
nearly impossible to build powerful policies using it. If you have a
simple network without complex policies or bgp communities it may not
matter to you, but if you have a complex network there is again just no
comparison. :)

There are plenty of other things that may or may no tmatter to you,
complex vlan rewrite and double-tag functionality that Foundry can't do,
advanced firewall features, things like that. Lack of /31 support and
inability to measure usage on routed vlans until the latest generation
of 8-port 10GE cards should probably be somewhere high on the list too.

Personally I wouldn't trade my MX's for XMR's even if they were free,
but if none of the above sounds like something you do then MLX/XMR may
be fine for you. Then again, you may want to compare it to Juniper EX
instead. EX is a lower end switch platform that doesn't do a lot of
things that MX does, but it's much closer to MLX functionality and 
they're running some dirt cheap EX promo pricing right now.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
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