Upgrade Path Options from 6500 SUP720-3BXL for Edge Routing

Wed Jul 30 07:53:23 UTC 2014

On Tuesday, July 29, 2014 04:21:32 AM Corey Touchet wrote:

> Right now my thinking are MX480 or ASR9k platforms. 
> Opinions on those are equally welcome as alternatives,
> but I’d love to hear from those with personal
> experiences today vs sales people trying to tell me it
> would route the world :)

Yep, MX480/960 and ASR9006/9010 are the way to go if you're 
looking at decent (Intel-based) CPU's, good performance and 
good 10Gbps/100Gbps port density, incuding combinations 
thereof. 

40Gbps might be a little tricky on these boxes; for that, 
looking at Ethernet switches (Nexus, C6880, Juniper EX) are 
better options. We don't mess around with 40Gbps - it's 
10Gbps or 100Gbps :-).

IOS XR on the CRS and ASR9000 is based on QNX, which suffers 
from being only a 32-bit kernel. So even if the hardware 
will ship with >4GB of RAM, the OS will only see 4GB (I have 
12GB in my CRS's and 8GB on my ASR9001's). 

IOS XR on the NCS runs on Linux, which removes the memory 
limitation, but it's not clear whether that philosophy will 
make it down to earlier IOS XR platforms (CRS, ASR9000).

Whatever the case, I've been following Blackberry for a 
while on this, and it doesn't seem like they have any plans 
to release a 64-bit version of QNX. AFAIK, their phones are 
all 32-bit, so...

Junos has no issue seeing 32GB of RAM (their currently 
highest RAM on their RE's), as it's a properly 64-bit OS. 
That said, some of the applications that run within Junos 
(notably "rpd") are still playing catch-up in terms of how 
much memory it can "see", and how well it can use the 
multiple cores present on the RE's. A lot of work is going 
on in this area, and generally, the later the Junos code you 
run, the more enhancements to the software you will see (and 
the accompanying bugs, hehe).

I've been testing Junos 14.1R1 in production on a couple of 
MX80's and MX480's for some weeks now. No issues to report 
(yet).

Mark.
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