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

[Aaron]

Hi Colton, first please understand that my motivation was to replace ~40 cisco me3600’s eventually… we have deployed our cisco me3600’s as mpls pe’s with eline, elan, etree in eline pw ldp flavors and bgp ad w/ldp sig vpls flavors… and vpnv4/6 (junos speak inet/inet6) for mpls l3vpn’s… we needed more 10 gig interfaces as our FTTH subs were consuming lots of bw.  So I wanted an mpls edge box about 1 or 2 U high around the same price as the ME3600’s it would replace and bunches of 10 gig interface with some 40/100 gig uplinks if possible.

 

we compared...

 

- Juniper ACX5048 – in lab

- Juniper MX104 – in lab

- Juniper EX4550 – in lab

- Cisco ASR903 – in lab

- Cisco ASR9001 – on paper

- Cisco ASR903 – in lab

- Cisco ASR920 (2 versions – in lab

- Cisco NCS5001 (skywarp) – in lab

 

I think the closest thing to the ACX5048 was the Cisco NCS5001…. But it was a dog in the lab trial.  Seriously, I had LLDP global config freeze up my ssh/telnet sessions… then l2vpn had serious issues and so did l3vpn.  That ncs5k was not ready from prime time in the state (hw/xr sw) that I had it in.

 

We went with the acx5048.  We bought (14) of them

 

I just spent the last few days testing various mpls l2vpn architectures so that I can confidently proceed with installing them.  (I was told they support lots of stuff and I proved out *some* of it last fall, but I needed to get more experience on it… now I feel a bit better with the eline, elan, etree ideas if have now introducing the acx5048 into my mpls cloud with other 9k’s and me3600’s.

 

Are there other mpls pe’s out there on the market ?  probably so…. I didn’t have time to test them all

 

-Aaron