[j-nsp] Why should I *not* buy an MX?

[Felix Schueren]

On 07.11.2008 23:27, sthaug at nethelp.no wrote:
 >> I'm not sure I follow.......do you not consider Foundry's MLX and
 >> XMR lines to be 'routers' ?  I admit, they've essentially taken a
 >> switch and taught it to route.....similar to the way Juniper took
 >> a router and are teaching it to switch (MX doing STP, etc).
The XMR/MLX are as much a "router" as the 6509 is, that is, they're not. 
They're switches, and not very good ones at that.

 > We haven't seriously looked at Foundry MLX and XMR, so I can't
 > comment on those. We *do* know quite a bit about Cisco 6500/7600 and
 > how well turning a switch into a router has worked for them. Knowing
 > this we are very glad that the Juniper MX series "inheritance" is
 > from the router side...
 >
I wholeheartedly agree.

We have MLX & XMR in production, the XMR was bought "because it could 
route", only... it doesn't. The "advanced" Layer2 features on the MLX 
are broken, we still (after over a year of "it's fixed, really") have 
multi-interface RVI ports occasionally stop forwarding when any member 
port is added/deleted/shutdown, the CLI is even clumsier and more
inconsistent than IOS, you can't have prefix-lists for ACLs, you can 
only do either MPLS or 802.1q, not both on the same interface, you don't 
got proper statistics for RVIs (only "bytes received" if you configure 
it) and lots more that I forgot. The chassis & parts are way too cheap & 
flimsy (mechanically), you can hardly get the line cards into the 
chassis sometimes because of small variances here & there. SSH is broken 
so horribly that we fell back to using telnet to manage the boxes. Last 
not least, software updates are a nightmare, with a dozen or so image 
files of very similiar names that go to different places, takes roughly 
half an hour to just get all the software to the right places, with at 
least one step blocking the CLI for ~5 minutes with no visible activity 
whatsoever. Scary stuff. The only good thing about them is that they 
boot quickly.

Executive summary: Foundry bad. Stay away.

We also have M320s & MX960s in production (as routers), the MX performs 
admirably so far, multiple full tables, l2vpn, l3vpn, 
flowSpec/flowFilter - everything we do on the M-series works on the MX 
as well so far.

Kind regards,

Felix

-- 
Felix Schueren, Head of NOC

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