NPE-G2 vs. Sup720-3BXL

Fri May 15 15:21:28 UTC 2009

dstorandt at teljet.com (David Storandt) wrote:

> Our engineering team has settled on three $20k/node options:
> - Sup720-3BXLs with PS and fan upgrades

Still quite slow CPU wise. RSP's are supposed to be a lot faster
and actually usable.

> - Sup2s as switches + ISIS + statics and no BGP, push BGP edge routing
> off to NPE-G2s across a 2-3Gbps port-channel

The NPE-G2 - even an NPE-G1 - will do all that BGP stuff easily;
the CPU is fast enough. But...you might be in for a bad surprise
concerning the Portchannel.

Remember - it's done in software. So, depending on your packet
sizes, you might experience a throughput _drop_ once you bundle.
My experiments were done with very small packets though (DNS
queries and responses, avg. packet size around 140 Byte).

The devices I tested were the 1RU models (7301 for NPE-G1 and
7201 for NPE-G2). In "unbundled mode" they pushed around 940 kpps
(G1) and 1320 kpps (G2) with CPU loads between 85% and 100%.

Channel bundling took a lot out of the boxes. 7301 keeled over
at 470, 7201 at 660 kpps.

If you're only pushing big packets, though...

Yours,
	Elmar.