Cisco CRS-1 vs Juniper 1600 vs Huawei NE5000E

Mikael Abrahamsson swmike at swm.pp.se
Fri Aug 3 08:47:33 UTC 2007


On Fri, 3 Aug 2007, ALEJANDRO ESQUIVEL RODRIGUEZ wrote:

>   Which equipment is better ( perfomance, availability, 
> scalability, features, Support, and Price ($$$) ) ???

There is no single answer to your question. Looking at what the platforms 
offer NOW (if you want future you have to talk to the vendors), some key 
points:

CRS-1 scales to at least 4-8 linecard chassis with current software.
Juniper T1600 doesn't have a multichassi solution.
NE5000E is available in two linecard chassi solution.

CRS-1 was designed from the beginning as a 64 (or 72, I dont remember) 
linecard chassi solution, Juniper and Huawei are working on their 
scalability.

If you need a lot of multicast you need to look into how the platforms do 
this, none of them will do wirespeed multicast on all packet sizes and 
they all have different ways of handling it internally. If you have less 
than 10% of your packets that are multicast, this is less of a worry.

Since Huawei is the challenger here, it's most likely they'll give you the 
most aggressive price.

If you need netflow, it might be good to know that CRS-1 does without the 
need for anything additional, both T1600 and NE5000E needs feature 
acceleration cards to do netflow properly, and NE5000E will only do 
netflow in the ingress direction on a linecard whereas CRS-1 and T1600 
will do it bidirectionally.

When it comes to operational issues, my personal opinion:

If you know Juniper, the OS of course identical on the T1600.
If you know IOS, IOS XR is fairly easy to learn.
Huawei OS looks configurationwise structurally like IOS, but with the 
commands changed on purpose (show is "display" etc).

There are a lot more things to say but a lot of it might be under NDA, so 
you need to talk to the vendors directly to get more details.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se


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