[j-nsp] ACX5448 & ACX710

[Mark Tinka]

On 23/Jan/20 08:38, Saku Ytti wrote:

> The new Cisco 8000 series ships with new, thinner variant of IOS-XR
> (it is not same IOS-XR 7 that ASR9k will run). Potentially this
> thinner IOS-XR could find home in Catalyst and ISR. As a customer, I'm
> not sure if that is what I want. I think I may actually just want
> monolithic IOS-XEd with _proper_ commit and BGP-API (so I can
> implement policy language in language of my choice)

I'm with you on this.


> I suspect long term they intend to replace ASR9k with 8k series. But
> GSR is still sold, by the time 8k is replaced, there probably still
> are few ASR9k customers, so overlap will be thing for long long time.

It does make sense to converge a lot of IP/MPLS functionality around a
single box that is versatile enough to support it. Juniper have had wild
success with the MX since 2007, and you see it doing a lot of things in
many areas of the network to a point of making all their other (larger)
platforms almost irrelevant.

If Cisco feel converging a lot of stuff into the 8000 makes sense, I'd
say they should do it. I'm not sure the market still wants too many
boxes doing too many things in an era where operators are struggling to
keep equipment spending at levels where they were 10, 15, 20 years ago.

This is one of the reasons operators with enough in-house coding skill
are seriously looking to build (or already building) their own routers
with DPDK on white boxes + friends, even if those solutions may be
proprietary and used in targeted deployments, e.g., distributed
low-scale edge, e.t.c. Vendors need to wake up and realize they can't be
the only ones not willing to feel the impact of an age where the kids
don't want to pay for data.

Mark.