Mx204 alternative

Fri Aug 9 17:23:53 UTC 2019

I would recommend the SLX9640.  12x 100G and 24x 1G/10G ports. 4 million 
routes in hardware without compression.  We've gotten 5.7M in there with 
compression.  Price point is super good.  Push them and they will get 
very aggressive on price.  VERY aggressive.

Aaron

On 8/7/2019 10:33 PM, Brandon Martin wrote:
> 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.

-- 
================================================================
Aaron Wendel
Chief Technical Officer
Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097)
(816)550-9030
http://www.wholesaleinternet.com
================================================================