[j-nsp] mx240 vs asr 9006

[Mark Tinka]

On Wednesday, April 25, 2012 03:54:56 PM Phil Bedard wrote:

> Yes thanks for mentioning that.
> 
> My opinion would be to use a MX480 like someone else said
> just due to the increased slot capacity, over the 9006
> or 240.

For me, the extra 2x slots on the MX480 wouldn't be a 
compelling-enough reason to choose it over the ASR9006. Like 
someone mentioned earlier, chassis pricing is so negligible 
that it makes more sense to go for an MX480 over an MX240 
like it would to go for an ASR9010 over an ASR9006. In our 
case, it's mostly come down to how much we want to scale in 
the space that we (don't have), which is why an MX240 has 
never made any sense to us, just like the ASR1004.

Moroever, both the MX and ASR9000 chassis' are shipping 
faster line cards that mean you can pack more bandwidth into 
a single slot by the time you think about scaling across the 
entire chassis.

Having operated both platforms in the same network, while 
I'll always have both vendors in my network as principle, my 
reasons to choose one over the other would be:

	o I'd prefer an ASR9000 over the MX because of the
	  "more intuitive" ingress packet marking on the
	  Cisco. Juniper can now do it on the Trio line
	  cards with firewall filters, but it doesn't
	  support marking of EXP bits. If only Juniper -
	  despite the numerous times I've asked - could
	  implement the ToS Translation Tables feature that
	  they do for the IQ2 and IQ2E PIC's for the M-
	  series routers, on the MX line, it would bring
	  them inline with Cisco on this platform (Juniper's
	  classic egress marking/rewriting has always been
	  awkward, IMHO).

	o I'd prefer the MX because it implements NG-MVPN,
	  while Cisco are still mucking about, re-enacting
	  the LDP vs. BGP fiasco of old.

	o I'd prefer the the Cisco if I had to mix the
	  classic and newer line cards in the same chassis,
	  as (at least for a long while), mixing DPC's and
	  MPC's was problematic. Word is that this is no
	  longer an issue - I'm due to test.

	o I'd prefer the Juniper because Cisco make you pay
	  for ridiculous licenses just to deploy l3vpn's on
	  the ASR9000.

You get the point... but:

	o Either router would be fine for basic IPv4, IPv6
	  and MPLS services.

	o Either router would be fine for PE Aggregation
	  scenarios in Metro-E networks.

	o Either router would be fine if I wanted to add
	  non-Ethernet line cards to it (the MX is now
	  sporting these, even though I'm wary it may not be
	  mature yet).

	o Either router would be fine if I wanted to run
	  100Gbps Ethernet ports.

Hope this helps.

Mark.