Upgrade Path Options from 6500 SUP720-3BXL for Edge Routing

Jimmy Hess mysidia at gmail.com
Wed Jul 30 13:06:55 UTC 2014


On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 5:56 PM, Simon Lockhart <simon at slimey.org> wrote:
> On Tue Jul 29, 2014 at 02:21:32AM +0000, Corey Touchet wrote:
>> Right now my thinking are MX480 or ASR9k platforms.  Opinions on those are
> Or, protect your existing investment in 6500 and replace the SUP720 with the
> SUP2T. You can then deploy the WS-X6904-40G-XL blades which give you 4 * 40G

I would generally suggest you look at it as a long term decision, at
least before jumping to the next incremental (modest increase) on the
upgrade treadmill.  It depends on whether the 6500 is still a perfect
match for your network other than the prefix limit.    Your vendor
should think of your equipment as an "investment"    to be protected,
  by exploiting your feelings of  loss aversion,   but the upgrade
treadmill is a trap.....    next thing you know,  you will have to
replace the chassis,   then you will need new linecards......

Keep in mind most of the MX series makes the 6500  look like a 5 port
linksys home router,  when it comes to carrying around and managing
large BGP tables;  both in terms of prefix capacity, speed,  the
policy/filtering/configuration management functionality of the OS,
and how they will take the  route update "beating"  during  setup of
new multiple BGP sessions...

The SUP2T  is   about  a 100% increase in TCAM size,  but  still
pretty limited  in terms of  system resources.

You can also "protect" your investment if appropriate by taking  this
late 1990s gear off your BGP edge, or otherwise recruiting it for a
role  which it is more suited for in this day and age, where  it is
not handling full tables and thus the feeble amount of FIB size, CPU,
memory  are  no potential hinderance now or on the next 10 years.

 The ability to link up 40G  ports did not seem terribly useful  when
it would all be unsafely oversubscribed.

>
> You can then look to migrate onto the 6880 chassis which gives you a faster
> backplane, whilst retaining compatibility with existing linecards.
>
> Simon


-- 
-JH



More information about the NANOG mailing list