[j-nsp] ACX is just not there (was Re: EX4550 L2Circuit/VPN to MX80/lt Interface)

[Eric Van Tol]

-----Original Message-----
From: juniper-nsp [mailto:juniper-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Austin Brower
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2014 6:35 AM
To: juniper-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: [j-nsp] ACX is just not there (was Re: EX4550 L2Circuit/VPN to MX80/lt Interface)

>So far, Eric, Mark, and Phil have all stated that the ACX is not the right >platform for their purposes.

>Could you elaborate on why? I've been looking at the ACX with some curiosity 

For starters, at least when we evaluated it last year, there was no switching or IRB support.  The chips are not Trio-based which means poor feature parity with our existing MX deployments (it really sucks creating separate class-of-service configs for every damn type of device).  Firewall filters could not match based upon prefixes, but rather only a single IP address or port number.  There was also no hierarchical queuing, but I was told that it was on the roadmap for 2014.  I have not checked to see if that goal was met.  Finally, the cost to reach only half the port density of the ME3600X was also an issue.

It's a nice router, but it simply didn't seem to "fit" within the metro ethernet deployment model that we have.  I echo Mark's statement about being told that a 1U MX was on the way.  That was three years ago and I can't imagine why Juniper won't make one of these.  We have dozens of ME3600Xs deployed that I would gladly have used MX gear, assuming they didn't want to charge insane license fees for H-QoS and 10GE port enabling.

-evt