I was wondering if anyone was using a Alcatel-Lucent 7750 Service Router
(SR) in their network? How does this platform compare the the Cisco ASR,
Brocade MLXe, and Juniper MX line?
We have been using them for almost 8 years now and have been pretty happy. What are you looking to use them for?
Taking full BGP routes from 4+ carriers on 10G connections. Why is ALU
never mentioned, but Juniper MX and Cisco are all day long?
The new 7750 SR-a4 looks like a Juniper MX80 or MX104 killer.
They are definitely good for that. We use them in part of our network for something very similar.
I am not sure why they aren't mentioned that much. I know that they have been pretty popular in the past couple years.
We are planning on using 7750 SR-a4's in the future but right now we mainly have 7750SR7/12s.
I am worried as most tech's know Cisco and Juniper, so going to ALU would
be a learning curve based on replies I am getting off list.
If you know Juniper and Cisco, the learning curve isn't so bad to pick up
the ALU CLI, after working with it for a brief time, you catch on quickly.
Their products are quite impressive, and a # of the carriers, are moving to
them and some have already moved to them and are quite happy with their
decision.
What's the price point of an SR-A4? Comparable to the MX104 or ASR9001?
-- Stephen
I will be getting one to try. I am pretty sure it will support the ol'
"show ? , config ?" If not that might be a problem 
Thank You
Bob Evans
CTO
that second command is "admin display-config" or "admin display-config |
match xxxx"
cheers
The show stuff is certainly there but the config is a bit different. You may have to get used to using the "info" command.
They also use logical IP interfaces which are then tied to physical, you don't directly configure L3 on a physical interface. You also have designations between service and network physical interfaces, although nowadays they can be set as "hybrid.".
It's really pretty simple if you are used to a Cisco or Juniper. They have tab and ? completion now for both commands as well as elements similar to Junos which is helpful.
Phil
+1 for the command structure and configuration being pretty simple to follow if you're used to a Cisco or Juniper.
In the main they are pretty good at what they do I guess but I'm not sure whether or not we're having seriously bad luck or there's something else a miss but sadly we've had a near 50% hardware failure rate on some of the cards we have deployed in our 7750 SR12 infrastructure.
Reply off list if you need any more information.
Mick
I am worried as most tech's know Cisco and Juniper, so going to ALU would
be a learning curve based on replies I am getting off list.
It's definitely quite different from the CLI. I'm still dabbling, but the guys here who have been through the training and are immersed in it really like it. We're using a couple for feature-rich BNG - lots of MLPPP at high bandwidths (for broadband), heavyweight QoS, BGP to the CE, etc. It's very controllable by RADIUS - template configs that you can fill in the values for, rather than the Cisco approach of AVPs with pages of config in.
ALU have an e-learning "SR-OS introduction" course, which is going down pretty well for jump-starting our Ops people.
Regards,
Tim.
Forgot to send this yesterday…
We use them in our networks along with ASR9Ks and MXs. There are a lot of them deployed around the world doing very similar things as ASRs and MXs. The config is more like Juniper than Cisco IMHO. Being kind of the “3rd” vendor they have a tendency to implement features proposed by both Cisco and Juniper faster than Cisco and Juniper when proposed by the other vendor. For instance Segment Routing is a Cisco thing, but ALU has already implemented it in their latest 13.0 software, Juniper is sort of dragging their feet on it because it’s a Cisco thing. Same goes for NG-MVPN (BGP signaled multicast VPN). Cisco dragged their feet on it because it was a Juniper thing, ALU had no issues implementing it much sooner. Most of ALUs innovation is on the MPLS services side. We use them for business VPN (L2 and L3) but the underlying protocols are all standard stuff and interoperate with everything else.
Phil
It’s not that hard to learn if you know the basics of IP routing. I just did an implementation of A-L 7705 SAR 8s and 18s. Now I really wish that Cisco supported the “info” command.
—Chris
yep.. its way easier and faster to take a look at what is configured:
And if you ever need to find out what can commands exist for a certain
string "xxx"
tree flat detail | match xxx
is a huge helper when learning.
e.g.
show router bgp routes [<family> [type <mvpn-type>]] aspath-regex <reg-ex>
show router bgp routes [<family> [<l2vpn-type>]] aspath-regex <reg-ex>
It really bothers me to see that people in this industry are so worried about a change of syntax or terminology. If there's one thing about the big vendors that bothers me, it's that these batteries of vendor specific tests have allowed many "techs" to get lazy. They simply can't seem to operate well, if at all, in a non-Cisco (primarily) environment.
Josh Reynolds <josh@spitwspots.com> writes:
It really bothers me to see that people in this industry are so
worried about a change of syntax or terminology. If there's one
thing about the big vendors that bothers me, it's that these
batteries of vendor specific tests have allowed many "techs" to get
lazy. They simply can't seem to operate well, if at all, in a
non-Cisco (primarily) environment.
If that bothers you, I recommend you not look at what passes for a
"system administrator" these days. It will make you cry.
-r
It really bothers me to see that people in this industry are so worried about
a change of syntax or terminology. If there's one thing about the big
vendors that bothers me, it's that these batteries of vendor specific tests
have allowed many "techs" to get lazy. They simply can't seem to operate
well, if at all, in a non-Cisco (primarily) environment.
I'd half-agree
Making "it's different" in and of itself a reason not to use a particular vendor does seem to head towards laziness.
But with the best will in the world, your good engineers *will* be slower until they familiarise with the new mind-maps (particularly things like the logical/physical split, SAPs, etc on the ALU) and the new magic words - although hopefully they'll be excited to learn something new too. Your weaker engineers are going to need more of a push and/or some help, and the further towards helpdesk and scripts you get, the more you're going to need to provide training - be that internal, external, new scripts and cribs sheets or whatever. That's an impact and cost it's unwise to ignore.
Regards,
Tim.
*grumble, grumble, grumble*
"Get off my lawn!"