[j-nsp] small service provider j router

Jérôme Nicolle jerome at ceriz.fr
Thu Mar 16 09:15:01 EDT 2017


Daniel,

Le 07/03/2017 à 15:48, Daniel Stamatov a écrit :
> "I'd say it's a minor one actually, cause honestly who has time to
> understand
> architectural differences between various generations of NPUs/PFEs and how
> those affect the suitability of the platform for a given project, or even
> how routers work in general and there're no fancy certificates rewarding
> this specific knowledge anyways."
> 
> Huh?

He's right. Most vendors don't disclose enough informations to help us
understand how their platforms actually works. We can only hope it will
perform up to spec, with no mean to verify it beforehands.

It probably doesn't matter to most of us 'til we hit a bug or limitation
caused by a serious design flaw.

It also causes a serious trust issue. Of course, most experienced
engineers won't doubt the PTX1000 and QFX10002 are the exact same
platform despite their chipsets beeing called differently. So why is it
priced with a 1 to 10 difference ?

Another example is how opaque Juniper is regarding factual limits of
some hardware built over generic ASICs, such as the QFX5100. I found no
trace of actual CAM partionning limits on any publicly available
document. The publicly available numbers are misleading. Had to find out
wich broadcom chip was inside and match to vendor's specs to finaly know
what that model was really capable of doing.

F**k it, I'm now buying Edge-Core's instead.

-- 
Jérôme Nicolle


More information about the juniper-nsp mailing list