[j-nsp] MX104 capabilities question

Tue Jun 7 14:23:46 EDT 2016

I thank everyone for their thoughts and comments, they do indeed jive with what I had already thought about the product.   As long as the MX104 is capable of handling the 5 full table BGP peers (slow I understand) I think its worth rolling one as it has to be better them my Sup720CXL’s which forces us to take smaller tables already (we are currently having to take only /20 and greater + default) from our providers as the 720 just cant hang at full tables.    In our particular application, we do not have any significant traffic (less than 1 Gb aggregate)  but large companies like redundancy so this is a good alternative.  If we were routing 20-30Gb /sec I think I might make the call to move to the MX240 but the cost doesn’t justify the end result in this case.   I will offer the bosses the alternative MX240 but doubt they will like the cost.  I guess we can say its all about compromises everywhere.

Thanks again to the list.

Ralph

From: Bill Blackford [mailto:bblackford at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 7, 2016 11:14 AM
To: Ralph E. Whitmore, III <ralphw at interworld.net>
Cc: juniper-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [j-nsp] MX104 capabilities question

A lot of folks have responded to this so at the risk of belaboring the point, yes the MX104 is very slow to load the FIB or during a churn. But forwarding performance is solid!

Port density is an issue. MX104 can hold up to 12 ports @10G and has no issues forming LAG's across each MIC or in combination with the on-board ports, but maxes out at 80Gbps so with a 1:1 subscription, you're limited to 8 10G ports. You can run out of those very quickly particularly if it's a peering router and you opt for direct PNI's as time goes on and scale increases. Adding a second MX104 doesn't help much because once you make all of the needed redundant interconnects, you're still very limited on ports.

So the next bump up (which is an investment no doubt) is the larger MX series. The MX240 has two card slots available. Using 16x10G or 32x10G will yield a nice port density. One school of thought is since the MX480 bare chassis is not much more than that of the MX240, it makes more ROI sense just to opt for the larger chassis. YMMV

On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 1:01 AM, Ralph E. Whitmore, III <ralphw at interworld.net<mailto:ralphw at interworld.net>> wrote:
I am in the process of replacing my old cisco650x hardware and was steered to this list to pose the following questions:

I have 4 primary BGP transits  each delivering 600k+ routes to me and we will be adding another probably 600k+peer in the near future.  The sales rep recommended the MX 104 to us first, but then came back to us and said "Sorry this router isn't adequate for your needs you need to be in the MX240 Chassis" I read the spec's I can find and it says from a routing engine perspective (RE-S-MX104)  that it will handle the routes with room to grow on."

From Juniper:
IPv4 unicast FIB 1 million
IPv6 unicast FIB  512K

Ipv4 RIB   4 million
IPv6 RIB  3 million

So the question is:  is there some other limiting factor(s)  that should steer me away from the MX104 to the MX240 Chassis? Is the sales rep blowing smoke?  I am hoping to find someone here who has tried this config and will either say yes this is great solution or  OMG, I'd never try that again.

Thanks

Ralph
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--
Bill Blackford

Logged into reality and abusing my sudo privileges.....