[j-nsp] EX4600 Vs QFX 5100 VS ACX 5048

[Mark Tinka]

On 30/Apr/16 02:24, Colton Conor wrote:

> So the Cisco 5001 is the direct competitor to the Juniper ACX5048.
> Both seem to be based off the Broadcom Trident II.  Mark can you give
> me more details on the reasons why the Broadcom based offerings are
> such a bad option?

I'm not saying the Broadcom chip is bad, I'm saying that if you are used
to having a ton of features easily available and accessible on the MX
Trio, you might be in for a shock on the Broadcom chip. We dumped the
ACX because the chip could not do certain things we felt were important
to us, and the ASR920 could (for more than half the price anyway). I
know Aaron has been struggling with VLAN mapping on the ACX this last
week. Although I'm not sure if that is related to the Broadcom chip,
such capability is straightforward on the Trio chips.


> I know you like the ASR920, but 4 10G ports is not enough.

True, but looking at the cost and features of the ASR920, and the value
it gives us when running IP/MPLS services in the Access, it's cheaper
for me to run dedicated dark fibre to a larger PoP for 10Gbps
requirements in some places, or deploy DWDM pizza boxes alongside my
ASR920's in others.

For us, feature parity across all vendor equipment regardless of
function, size or location is much more important than anything else.

When the vendors figure out how to deliver cheap 10Gbps ports on custom
chips in a 1U chassis, I'll be the first one to buy.

>  
>
> Besides Cisco and Juniper solutions discussed, what else is out there
> that has more than 4 10G ports with these feature sets?

Look at Brocade.

I'm not sure what they are doing now, but back then, they had a solid 1U
Metro-E box. We never bought it because we wanted to keep two vendors
only in our network. Technically, the box was/is sound. But I'd
definitely buy them for some specific use cases we are working on.

Mark.