I'm aware the Cisco 7600 series is really just an evolution/different way
of orienting the chassis of the Catalyst 6500 line. I'm interested in talking
to those of you who are doing production tasks in the backbone or core with
the 7600, particularly if you've compared it to vendor J or can comment at
length on MPLS, VRF, and uRPF features in the device. Please reply off-list.
No sales droids please, this is a technical discussion.
Tim
Tim,
I can't speak to the 7600 series from experience (I'm using the 6509 with
MSFC2); however, my opinion is that Cisco continues to market their routers
as suitable for core routing whereas the routers are 'just acceptable' as an
edge aggregation device.
Several weeks ago there was a lively debate on Nanog regarding cisco
performance, if I recall correctly, one party indicated that they upgraded
from a 7206 NPE400 to a GSR and only saw a 30% improvement in CPU
utilization. That's a lot of bling bling for 30%...
I need only a few high capacity interfaces but a lot more acl, mpls, qos
crunching horsepower than what I can get from Cisco right now. I'm curious
whether vitamin J is a better option for the core at a specific price point.
It would be great to have a comparison chart that showed a correlation
between a Cisco Mach GT and Juniper Diablo at each key price point, $25,000,
$50,000, $75,000 and so on.
YMMV,
Christopher J. Wolff
Christopher Wolff wrote:
Several weeks ago there was a lively debate on Nanog regarding cisco
performance, if I recall correctly, one party indicated that they upgraded
from a 7206 NPE400 to a GSR and only saw a 30% improvement in CPU
utilization. That's a lot of bling bling for 30%...
Especially as you can more than double the performance of a NPE400 to a
NPE-G1 for far less. If you have CPU-intensive needs, there are many cases
where a NPE-G1 is a better answer than a 6500, 7600 or GSR.
OTOH if you're "just" moving packets, the "high-end" stuff is much more
likely to be your answer.
As a point of interest, AARNet have chosen Procket routers for AARNet3.
Would be interesting to know what the decision factors were, price or
performance -- is a T640 just too slow? 
David.