Mx204 alternative

Thu Aug 8 03:33:37 UTC 2019

On 8/7/19 11:02 PM, Mehmet Akcin wrote:
> I am looking for some suggestions on alternatives to mx204.
> 
> Any recommendations on something more affordable which can handle full 
> routing tables from two providers?
> 
> Prefer Juniper but happy to look alternatives.
> Min 6-8 10G ports are required
> 1G support required

Extreme (ex Brocade) SLX9540 will do full tables from a couple providers 
in a local edge scenario with their "OptiScale" FIB optimization/route 
caching, but the whole FIB won't fit in hardware.  Bandwidth is very 
generous (up to 48x10G + 6x100G), and prices are reasonable.  You 
wouldn't need any of the stupid port licenses, just the advanced feature 
license, so it should be about 25-40% more than an MX204 based on public 
pricing I've seen.  That would get you 24x10G + 24x1G (the rest of the 
hardware is all there just locked out).

The SLX9650 will supposedly (if marketing and my SEs are to believed) do 
4M IPv4 in hardware FIB, less if you want IPv6, too but still full 
tables of both with ample room for L2 MACs, next-hops, and MPLS. 
Bandwidth is, well, "Extreme" at I think 24x25G + 12x100G (25G breakout 
capable, all 25G also capable of 1G/10G).  Pricing is supposedly "about 
double" a 9540.

Be advised that the control plane SOFTWARE is NOT as mature as JunOS. 
It's being built up rapidly, but there's still a lot of stuff missing. 
I have not, so far, run into any of the weird glitches that I've seen on 
older Foundry/Brocade products, though, so that's good.  There's also no 
oddball restrictions about port provisioning like the MX204 has. 
Control plane HARDWARE is well more than capable with something like 
16GB (or maybe 32?) of RAM and a Xeon CPU.  There's actually a fully 
supported option for a guest VM for local analytics, SDN, etc. in remote 
scenarios.

If you just want to push packets, they're nice boxes.  If you want "high 
touch" service provider features, I think you may find them lacking. 
They're worth looking at, though, if only because of the 
price/performance ratio.

Arista has some similar boxes with similar caveats in terms of infantile 
software.

MX204 is a very nice pizza box router for service providers.  I'm not 
aware of anything quite like it in terms of having a mature control 
plane.  I like the JunOS config language better than Cisco-style that 
most other folks use.
-- 
Brandon Martin