[j-nsp] Junos Fusion Provider Edge

[Allan Eising]

Excerpts from Saku Ytti's message of 2016-06-06 17:11:14 +0300:
> Apologies for hijacking.
> 
> Why are people buying into satellite concept? It will obviously have
> poorer MTBF than just sticking L2 switch to a router, due to more
> complex control-plane, which necessarily will mean more software
> issues.
> 
> So what are the benefits gained? Easier provisioning? Getting rid of
> some issues like MAC learning, which you should be able to disable in
> switch too.
> 
> On related note, is no one making reasonable 1GE aggregation device,
> with full DFZ? If MX104 and ASR9001 are best we have, then situation
> seems dire. I don't need NPU/run-to-completion level intelligence,
> some pipeline basic low-touch box would be sufficient, but isn't
> anyone making those?
> 

Hi Ytti,

For a previous employer, I was part of a decent-sized Cisco satellite
deployment, so I can contribute a little to the motivations.

The ASR9000V-setup gave us the possibility of having inexpensive remote
line-cards on small pops. These 9kV devices were cheaper than normal line cards
and acted completely like normal router ports, ie. unique VLANs per port,
direct termination in L3VPNs, queuing, and all that. Furthermore, the nV
technology enabled us to create rings of satellites between two PEs, so
customers could be served in an active/standby fashion by two routers. 

This reduced the number of PE routes in our network drastically, and allowed us
to quickly roll out new POPs, and easily add more ports when necessary. 

Also, provisioning was simplified, as the number of platforms could be reduced;
old legacy 7600-routers were replaced by satellite devices on already existing
PE-routers.

Our bread-and-butter was <= 1G capacities, so for that use case it was a good
solution, if you don't mind the vendor lock-in.

Best,

Allan