I am hoping to get some peoples opinions on Alcatel-Lucent routers. We are looking at the 7750 SR line and the 7450 ESS line. We are currently a Cisco shop but these would be deployed in a completely new network delivering mostly MPLS based services and DIA. Any comments are welcome, good and bad.
---Chris
The 7750 and 7450 are really good products. We were a pure Cisco shop about three years ago and then started using the 7750. We are very happy with the product.
If you have any questions you can contact me off list.
Unit functionality seems to be very good. My experience with their support groups has been less than good. Our sales rep and sales engineer are very helpful, as are the developers of the 7450 software I've been dealing with. But their support team loves, outright LOVES to say "no" and they do it an awful lot. "No" we don't support that, "no we never intend to support modern Solaris OS or patch levels", "no we won't support you in this config", etc. As it turns out the developers of the software already have fixes for all the reported problems, have every intention and working patches to support modern Solaris releases, etc.
So my experience so far has been good product, good company, needs a real attitude adjustment in the support department.
Chris Wallace wrote:
I am hoping to get some peoples opinions on Alcatel-Lucent routers. We are looking at the 7750 SR line and the 7450 ESS line. We are currently a Cisco shop but these would be deployed in a completely new network delivering mostly MPLS based services and DIA. Any comments are welcome, good and bad.
---Chris
Hello !!
First time on the list 
I'd like to say something in opposite . These are very weak routers ..
We ( SP on country level , PL ) had two of them , implemented in core , as pure ip routers .
The worst thing in it was bgp proto .. Router was unable to withstand 20+ peering sessions , most of that outgoing bgp session to customers , a few peerings , and only 1v2 incoming upstream providers
When there was instability/surge in bgp updates , router was able to break itself tcp sess. Dwnld bgp table (150,000prefix) took 2h or more ...
Things done in hardware should be working although ( bridge .. , maybe label switching , vpls ) Tech support is very weak. Expect problems with interoperability .
Sorry to say that . It was 3+ years time ago , maybe they improved themself ..
If you want 2 spare chassis , we have them free
// best regards Piotr Sawicki .
The worst thing in it was bgp proto .. Router was unable to withstand 20+ peering sessions , most of that outgoing bgp session to customers , a few peerings , and only 1v2 incoming upstream providers
When there was instability/surge in bgp updates , router was able to break itself tcp sess. Dwnld bgp table (150,000prefix) took 2h or more ...
Things done in hardware should be working although ( bridge .. , maybe label switching , vpls ) Tech support is very weak. Expect problems with interoperability .
Sorry to say that . It was 3+ years time ago , maybe they improved themself ..
Hi,
I must say we had very old timos 2.0R17 , as you now use 8.0 I guess ..
As most of my complains is against software , this may be improved - i hope it is
Hardware is solid, 'hard to kill'
Sorry for a bit preliminary assumptions about 7750SR platform .
// regards PiotrSawicki.
I've done some recent testing and while the BGP download time isn't blazing fast, it can load 400k routes and propagate them to 20 other peers in a few minutes. Certainly not 2 hours. 
I've also done quite a bit of interop testing with the other main vendors as well and have yet to run into anything major.
Phil