[j-nsp] MPLS in the Access

[Pavel Lunin]

> So what to do?
>
> 1) Wait for Cisco with their ME 3600X and hope they cost less than half
> an MX80, or hope that Juniper brings out an enhanced EX-4200?
>

Don't believe the latest is possible. IMHO EX needs just completely another
PFE in order to support 2-label operations.


> 2) Keep both a router and a separate switch at each site, perhaps with
> an EX-4200 and an M7i? The M7i is quite old now though...
>

Is M7i really cheap enough? Seems like even SRX650 turned to packet-mode is
more interesting (well, let's suppose it's as stable as M7i :). It even has
10GE card in contrast to M7i. If you want more that one PIC in M7i it
becomes more expensive than MX80. Otherwise it's just 2Gig FD, what, I am
afraid, is not much for this price today.


> 3) CCC on an EX-4200 in the access to bring the circuits to a smaller
> number of MX-boxes? (Or similar products from other vendors)
>

Vise-versa, I would say: MX as a router for 'service point' and similar
product from other vendor for switching garbage. At least EX3200 is twice
cheaper and has absolutely same features for this sort of deployment. Very
popular sort of design where everything depends on how well you can manage
the switches. Main goal is to not forget, that you also need MX, not just
the garbage :)


> 4) Give up on MPLS in the access and build a layer 2 access based on
> PBB/Q-in-Q/VLAN's?
>

PBB seems to be a cool modern acronym with a lot of buzz around, if someone
has any more or less real experience with it, hey, how about to share your
thoughts? :)

Another approach can be a large VC ring of EX4200s built with VCE (ethernet)
links:
http://www.juniper.net/us/en/local/pdf/implementation-guides/8010045-en.pdf

Seems to be a reasonable solution when scale of up to 9 nodes in a single
ring is OK. First EX4200 is known to be more or less stable (in my
experience), second VCCP is actualy ISIS which is way more interesting than
most ethernet scaling technologies rooted in LAN. As of my experience,
Juniper's VC implementation is rather not bad. Moreover they even announced
EX4500 to support virtual chassis some day, but this is too dreamy by now,
and no one knows how good EX4500 will be.

Actually I know some vendor producing small devices, which can do VPLS,
Martini and L3VPN in 1-unit form factor with wire speed performance of 24GE
with 10GE up-links for price at the level of 2xEX4200-24F. Even the vendor's
reputation is not that bad. But since I have absolutely no experience with
them yet and everything is too fuzzy, I'd prefer to follow the Mark's way
and ask if someone can say something less abstract :)

--
Pavel