Huawei Routers in the Core

Kim Onnel karim.adel at gmail.com
Thu Jul 6 08:16:18 UTC 2006


Hi,

First, thanks goes to all that has replied, I was asked by people to
summarize the replies i got so far on the topic, so here it goes:

1- Someone said that they are doing very well in the IPTV and multicast, but
they are not in the US.

2- Another one said: Huawei's data-comm products have been already deployed
widely in Asia, Europe and South America,  and that Huawei's routers have
very good compability with Cisco's.(personal experience) There are no
problems in BGP/MPLS/PIM interconnection with Cisco.
OSPF/ISIS/policy based routing/ACL,MIB,Password/VPN... These are basic
requirement for core router, all supported, except for properietry Cisco
protocols like EIGRP and TACACS.

3- In Asian markets, Huawei is selling the Avici TSR with the Huawei
name/logo.

4- I've seen your post about Huawei NE/AR routers in cisco-nsp list a while
ago. Actually I was not subscribed, just a friend of mine sent me a
link.

We are working with Huawei for a couple of years now and I have seen
most of their datacomm boxes. Now we are running two NE80e's as our ASBR
and still have two more NE40's from previous instalation. I'm afraid I
cannot give you any comparison tables (because I never had time to make
them), but if you have questions, I'm open to discussion.

5- I have to say that last two years with them had been a great experience
for me. I'm not saying, that it had been without any problems and
complications, but what is really amazing is their advance.

Two years ago, they were cheap alternative with quite good performance,
sometimes bad software and the lack of features. Nowdays with NE40/80e
series, they are pretty good and I'm really wondering, what they can do in
another year.

6- Detailed opinion:

A) Performance:
- even 3-4years old NE40 had forwarding rate of 6Mpps per board
- their combination of ASIC and NP seems to be a good way
- we had some problems with BGP, later resolved.
- same with full BGP tables, cards had to be set into LARGE_FIB mode which
had impact on overall performance
- all these problems seem to be solved now on NE40/80E series
- I'm using 10xGE boards and also some 10GE for testing (with S8505
switch)

B) OS
- they call it VRP, same on all boxes, just minor + feature differences
- online patch support possibility, never used
- good stability, no fault

C) Support
- Cisco gave us lame support compared to Huawei.
- very good cooperation with local support and even with R&D in case of need

D) New features
- it's hard to beat cisco in a feature field, but there are just few that
I'm missing now (and most of them is with switch, not router)

E) Comparing with cisco... hmm... 8/10 for technology, but 20/10 for
cooperation and their potential for the future


7) I am about to order a number of Huawei NE40's. I just got back from a
trip to Huawei headquarters in Shenzen, China. My testing has shown that
they really compete well against the equivalent Cisco. The CLI is a bit
wierd to start with, but you get used to it. We also use AR18's and AR28's
as CPE for our customers. We have some Huawei 8500, 6500 and 5600 switches
powering our metro Ethernet service. They are much better than 6500, but
still need to develop more feature cards.

8) Yes Huawei has a very wide range of routers and in high end routers they
are
much cheaper than cisco and provide excellent support to their customers. I
myself have worked on NE40E series and its really a competetive product.

9) Their metro optical stuff is well made and works like a champ, but we
dont use their routers

Thats all i got, pretty encouraging, if anyone thinks otherwise, please
enlighten me.

On 7/3/06, Kim Onnel <karim.adel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> We have been looking at Huawei line of routers recently and i was kind of
> surprised to see they have Core stuff, that are able to handle Gigs of
> traffic and MPLS, i cant seem to find anyone around that have used any of
> these, i wonder if anyone here has, i'd love to hear what he/she has to say,
> positive or negative feedback.
>
> Offline messages are welcomed.
>
> Thanks,
>  Kim
>
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