Need recommendation on an affordable internet edge router

Thu May 4 22:04:21 UTC 2017

The ASR9k is certainly up to the task and it's one of the few we looked at initially, but the pricing is nowhere near commodity even if we got a minimal build.

As far as volume, the initial purchase for this round of budget will be an HA pair. If the solution works well, we have potential to replace 12 or so throughout FY17, maybe into FY18.

Lots of responses very quickly, thanks. Definitely appreciate the suggestions from people who have selected and operated.

________________________________
From: Saku Ytti <saku at ytti.fi>
Sent: Thursday, May 4, 2017 2:43 PM
To: c b
Cc: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Need recommendation on an affordable internet edge router

On 4 May 2017 at 23:39, c b <bz_siege_01 at hotmail.com> wrote:

>   *   Affordable. I know that's subjective, but we need a solution that is as close as possible to commodity-pricing if this modernization effort balloons to include all of our data centers.

How many? For any non-trivial volume devices with equal ports and
features tend to cost the same from every vendor.  Unfortunately your
density requirements are very modest.
Also are you sure you are as price sensitive as you think you are?
I.e. maybe not look just your BU's budget, but impact on bottom line.
Since saving here some, may end up costing in OPEX significantly more
over time, and that case may be easier to make than you think. Usually
router/switch CAPEX isn't even a blip in enterprises bottom line.

But you probably should review at least:
  - Juniper MX204, MX480
  - Cisco ASR9k
  - Huawei NE20, NE40
  - Alcatel 7750SR

Personally I'm bit worried about Cisco's transition to newish OS and
new linecard architecture. Might come out good, might have some
rearing issues.

Alcatel is expensive to automate, as you cannot ship it new full
config and have it roll-forward to it from old config. I am also
worried that they are essentially developing their own booting OS,
instead of developing routing suite on existing OS, I'm not sure if
that is good investment of engineering hours, and if that's reason why
they're stuck in PowerPC, while others rock XEON. However Alcatel's
SMP capability is probably currently best of the bunch.

All of the stated options are NPU/run-to-completion boxes which have
higher port-price and better features than pipeline boxes. However
pipeline boxes are far denser and cheaper per port, but from your POV
they'll be even more expensive as your density requirement is so
modest. You have no stated features which couldn't be met by their
pipeline portfolios, so if you had the scale, pipeline box, like PTX1k
or any of the BRCM Jericho boxes might be more interesting to you.

--
  ++ytti