GSR, 7600, Juniper M?, oh my!

Wed Jan 7 17:10:58 UTC 2004

>> Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
>> What about longer term maintenance issues? Is the
>> 7500 not scheduled for EOL from Cisco 'soon' ? So,
>> purchasing 7500 bits that might be dropped by
>> 'normal' Cisco support in 1 year versus purchasing
>> some other hardware that will be in support longer
>> might pay out in the longer term?

See below, I'm mostly talking about no throwing away what you already
have; eBay is good for spares (a router sitting in a warehouse does not
need software) and line cards, no more.

Long-term support: as pointed out recently, I would be more comfortable
with a 7500 without support vs. a 7600 with support as of today, the
reason being I already know the tricks the 7500 is going to throw at me
(mostly).

> Drew Weaver wrote:
> Well technically buying a used 7500 doesn't entitle you
> to run IOS on it, so you need to re-license the Ebay
> Special and that usually costs close to what a new 7500
> would cost.

True, but I'm not talking about buying a new router on eBay, I'm talking
about using what lots of us already have (a bunch of 7500s) that are
already paid for and legally licensed. As you unrack some of the 7500s
out of production, you take them out of smartnet but don't throw them
away: you keep them as spares, which allows you to take the production
7500s out of the 4hour/365 smartnet to put them on support-only
maintenance. That's what I call free (it's not exactly, but close):
router paid for already and el-cheapo contract on it.

> I've heard conflicting reports, is a 7206 faster
> at packet switching than a 7507?

Greatly depends what's inside it. Sure, if your 7507 has an RSP2 (which
basically is a 3640 on a blade) and legacy (meaning, non-dcef) blades a
7206 will beat the crud out of it. However, a loaded 7206 with a low-end
NPE can choke when the 7507 with an RSP16 and recent VIPs will sail
smoothly.

Michel.