MX204 applications, (was about BGP RR design)

Tue Feb 19 16:04:28 UTC 2019

> Saku Ytti
> Sent: Friday, February 15, 2019 8:41 AM
> 
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 9:55 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:
> 
> > > MX204 be good for that ?
> >
> > I'm sure it will be - it's an MPC7 in a cage :-).
> 
> Anyone know why MX204 has so few ports? It seems like it only has WAN
> side used, leaving FAB side entirely unused, throwing away 50% of free
> capacity.
> 
I don't think aiming for good PPS is the case.
See KB33477, if the "spare" capacity was there to boost the available pps budget for the artificially limited number of ports I don't think there would be any KB33477.
Maybe some other architectural challenge, don't know?

Also this could be asked of any platform from any vendor, just give us 48x 40/100GE ports for each NPU and we'll figure out what to do with those. 
Maybe there will be use-cases where I enable all of them as I don't expect much traffic/pps to be generated on each port and maybe there will be cases where I enable just one port as I expect 64b frames @ line-rate and have 100k lines in the filter matching for packet size.

You actually reminded me of the A9K-24X10GE vs A9K-36X10GE (yes please, I'll have 36 ports variant and I'll decide what to do with them).

adam