[j-nsp] M7i

[Mark Tinka]

On Thursday, March 24, 2011 02:49:59 PM cjwstudios wrote:

> Hello Juniper folks :)

Sorry for the rather late chime-in on this one:

> Since everything is cost sensitive these days I initially
> planned on implementing an ebayish 7206vxr-npe-g1. 
> Although I was quite happily slinging the 7206 around 10
> years ago I realized tonight that it has been 10 years
> and the 7206 platform is well aged.

Well, it depends on how you look at this.

The 7206-VXR chassis is really quite old, yes. However, the 
NPE's are what keep the box going. While the NPE-G1 is quite 
good, in many cases, it will top-out somewhere between 
300Mbps - 500Mbps, depending on what you're doing.

The NPE-G2 should be able to touch 900Mbps with ease (I've 
done 950Mbps on it - MPLS, RSVP, LDP, IS-IS, BGP, basic QoS, 
IPv6).

Both the NPE-G1 and NPE-G2 are fairly modern if you consider 
the fact that they are CPU-based forwarding boards. Also, 
Cisco's IOS 12.2(33)SR* code base (now in its SRE iteration) 
is very advanced. It's what keeps the box modern.

Even with all our M, T, MX, CRS, ASR1000 and ASR9000 
platforms in the stable, the NPE-G1's/G2's are still very 
handy, more so when nearly all connections are Ethernet in 
nature.

The biggest problem with the 7206-VXR chassis is the 
bandwidth points limitation, where certain PA's (port 
adapters) will consume a certain amount of backplane 
bandwidth, determining the limitation on how many PA's you 
can scale to. If you looking at things like STM-1/OC-3, 
Fast-E and Gig-E PA's, this can get hectic, but if you're 
working on E1 PA's and things of the sort, there is nothing 
to worry about. Slower interfaces don't generally tax as 
much, if at all.

If you're only concerned about Ethernet, then the NPE-G1/G2 
won't penalize you if you only use the ports on the NPE 
itself. Of course, you quickly run into a density issue if 
you need more than 3 ports. The 7201 will solve that as it 
has 4 ports, but this may yet be still not enough.

For us, one of the biggest reasons we still maintain dozens 
of 7206-VXR's with NPE-G1's/G2's is for situations where we 
need to handle less than 1Gbps, but need a whole lot of 
features which can come with restrictions in hardware-based 
platforms, e.g., QoS, e.t.c. There are really are tons of 
features in this platform's code that would put any hardware 
box to shame - provided you can keep utilization below 1Gbps 
for the NPE-G2. In low bandwidth peering sites, we'll 
happily place an NPE-G1/G2 on the boat to go solve that 
problem :-).

Will Cisco release an NPE-G3 and keep the platform relevant. 
I don't know. I doubt, now that the ASR1000 is expanding in 
cousins. But as long as the SR* code continues to be 
developed for the 7200, the box will remain alive for the 
simple reason that most folks that need to handle more than 
1Gbps will not consider a 7200 anyway - but below that, it 
is still a very viable option.

> I suppose my questions are whether a base M7i config out
> of the box will support this application or if there are
> better options out there.  Thank you in advance.

The problem with the M7i is that it's now old. For the 
amount of money the box costs, one doesn't feel they should 
be restricted in the way the box does. If it were cheaper 
(along with its components), I wouldn't complain as much. 
Heck, I wouldn't complain at all.

That said, if you need hardware-based 6-in-4 tunneling 
without worrying about buying an MS-PIC or Tunnel PIC, the 
M7i is a great box for that. Then again, an NPE-G1/G2 will 
do that for you quite easily, but in the CPU path (not quite 
a bad thing unless you really need to handle more capacity).

Moving forward, though, if you need to handle all Ethernet, 
I'd say consider the ASR1001/2/4/6 on the Cisco side, or the 
MX80 on the Juniper side.

If you need to handle some Ethernet and some TDM/SDH/SONET, 
I'd say consider the ASR1001/2/4/6 on the Cisco side, or the 
M120 on the Juniper side.

Sadly, there is nothing in the Juniper portfolio that can 
compete with the Cisco's ASR1000 line as of today. Waiting 
for that book to be written :-). Meanwhile, we continue to 
buy more ASR1000's for that role.

Cheers,

Mark.
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