[j-nsp] Suggestions for Edge/Peering Router..

[Jason Lixfeld]

Hi,

> On Sep 18, 2019, at 5:15 PM, Howard Leadmon <howard at leadmon.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>   I am looking to replace an older Cisco I have sitting down in Equinix, and have l have had a few tell me that I should look at the Juniper routers as well.

Diving into Juniper/JunOS isn’t for the faint of heart.  It’s a completely different animal.

JunOS is a slick, powerful OS, no doubt, but there’s so much nuanced configuration to hardware compatibility, and more feature-x-stops-working-after-software-upgrade headaches than I could have ever imagined from a vendor.  Their policy and filter language is very comprehensive, but very complicated and takes a long time to get familiar with and understand.

For the past year I’ve been testing Juniper/JunOS for the first time, and you know, I’ve got to tell you, you might want to stick to Cisco if that’s what you're comfortable with.  Testing has been long and frustrating, and of the 4 platform that I was looking at, all for various tasks, I decided that the only role I’m comfortable having played by Juniper is an MX204 running as a BFD/ISIS/LDP/MPLS enabled peering/transit border router.  So far, it seems to do that *really* well.  However, based on feedback received from people who have been running Juniper for a long time, and reading what folks have been saying here and elsewhere, we feel that it’s just too risky to put this stuff anywhere else.

Don’t get me wrong, Cisco definitely owns their share of BS, but they seem to be predictable in how they are going to screw you.  Juniper will screw you, but how they are going to screw you seems to be predictably unpredictable.

FWIW, you may want to check out Arista’s 7280R.  We’ve just deployed a pair of these for EVPN-MPLS and they’re slick, and from what I understand, they have the FIB scale to be able to act as a border router.  It’s a very IOS-like CLI (but so many things about the CLI are so much more refined than IOS) so it may be more familiar, unless you’re Cisco experience is limited to IOS-XR.  It’s about USD$50K list for 48 x SFP+ /  6 x 40/100G, including licensing.

It’s a BCM Jericho based pizza box, so that’s redundant powered, but not “redundant” in so far as there are no redundant supervisor/management cards.  But, for the number of times I’ve had that kind of failure on any of my boxes that have had redundant cards, I don’t think it’s worth the cost or the rack space, especially if it’s just a border router where you’ve probably got a bunch of other border router that can accommodate a crash or a reboot or whatever.

Hope that helps.