Cisco Router best for full BGP on a sub 5K bidget 7500 7200 or other vendor ?

Sat Feb 7 12:50:46 UTC 2004

On 7-feb-04, at 11:48, Alexander Hagen wrote:

> I have been looking for a sub 5K router on the used market to support
> around 30-50 megs peak traffic.

[...]

> We are looking at a pure Ethernet environment - but with the desire to
> support a lot of value added services - such as IPSEC, VoIP, traffic
> accounting.

I would go for the 7200 VXR, if the price works. The 7200 has a nice 
simple architecture and is still fairly current, unlike the 7500. The 
fact that everything is done in software saves big time on complexity 
and power usage. A multilayer switch gives you much more bang and ports 
for your buck but you pay for that in complexity: harder to configure 
and monitor (this is especially bad for Cisco layer 3 switches, 
Foundry, Extreme and Riverstone are better in this regard), trouble 
because certain features or combinations thereof aren't supported in 
hardware and you often get into trouble with agressive worm scanning or 
denial of service attacks. A Juniper gives you the same bang (but not 
the same number of ports) for a few more bucks but will hold up much 
better under adverse circumstances.

As the saying goes: fast, cheap, good: pick any two. A 7200 is cheap 
and good, L3 switches are fast and cheap and a Juniper is fast and 
good.