Does anyone have any experience with these two routers, we're looking to buy one of them but i have little experience dealing with cisco routers and zero experience with juniper.
I have used the ASR1002-F in a previous life and I was very pleased with
it. Performance was a massive increase from the 3845 we had. The warm
standby IOS is a nice feature for in service upgrades and crash avoidance.
I don't have much experience with the MX series of things but you would be
happy with the ASR assuming it meets your bandwidth/port
density requirements.
-=Tom
Which specific models are you looking at?
Both contain a large product range.
I have lots of MX80s and they have all been fantastic. But if you have no experience of Juniper it will be a different learning curve (one that is, IMO, worth the effort).
I have not used the asr1000 but it looks like a capable box. You would do well to look at the MX80 fixed chassis, it comes with 48 1G interfaces and 4 10G interfaces. They are pretty good value, I think.
I would also be interested in peoples experiences with the MX80
platform. Currently considering the MX40 license level of MX80
platform for a project. We have had good experiences with the ASR1002
but want to keep our options open.
From: jon Heise [mailto:jon@smugmug.com]
Sent: 19 January 2012 21:37
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: juniper mx80 vs cisco asr 1000Does anyone have any experience with these two routers, we're looking
to buy one of them but i have little experience dealing with cisco
routers and zero experience with juniper.I have lots of MX80s and they have all been fantastic. But if you have no experience of Juniper it will be a different learning curve (one that is, IMO, worth the effort).
I have not used the asr1000 but it looks like a capable box. You would do well to look at the MX80 fixed chassis, it comes with 48 1G interfaces and 4 10G interfaces. They are pretty good value, I think.
It well depends on your requirements (not talking about throughput).
The ASR1000 series is a "services" box. It does more in terms of
services (using license enablers) than the MX80 does, and it costs
more.
So, it very much depends on what you want to do with the boxes.
--Ariel
The ASR1000 series are like most Ciscos, they can be used for a lot of
things. They are a swiss-army knife of routers and basically are the
upgrade from the Cisco 7200 series.
If you want low level LNS functionality, then the Cisco is the way to go as
the Juniper MX80 does not have LNS functionality (and looks like it never
will).
But if you are looking for a beast of a border router for BGP and so on,
then the MX80 (MX5/10/40/80) kick ass with their throughput. MX80 series
are also supposed to be supporting Virtual Chassis at some point (was
supposed to be now, but I hear it is delayed).
We're deploying a variety of MX5, MX10's for different projects at the
moment.
The other thing is that the MX80 platform, comes in very cheap options like
the MX5 - with 20Gb of TP and 20Gig interfaces at under 25k, that is
awesome. The MX5/10/40 are the exact same hardware and you can just upgrade
with a license. The base MX5 has 4 * 10GbE interfaces which aren't usable
until you go to MX40 (2 of them) or MX80 (all 4). But in an MX10, with the
second slot active, you can put in a 2 port 10GbE card which works just
fine.
…Skeeve
It might be because of your schedule/timetable, but you are comparing
apples to oranges.
MX80 is not competing against ASR1k, and JNPR has no product to compete
with ASR1k.
MX80 competes directly with ASR9001. Notable differences include:
ASR9001 has lot more memory (2GB/8GB) and lot faster control-plane
ASR9001 has 120G of capacity, MX80 80G
ASR9001 BOM is higher, as it is not fabricless design like MX80 (this
shouldn't affect sale price in relevant way)
ASR9001 does not ship just now
As others have pointed out ASR1k is 'high touch' router, it does NAPT,
IPSEC, pretty much anything and everything, it is the next-gen VXR really.
ASR9001 and MX80 both do relatively few things, but at high capacity.
Isn't the ASR9001 closer to the MX80?
Thanks,
-Drew
While the ASR1002 does offer more services, I generally disagree with some
parts of this comparison.
Juniper has some very aggressive pricing on mx80 bundles license-locked to
5gb, which are cheaper and blow the performance specifications of the
equivalent low end ASR1002 out of the water for internet edge BGP
applications. Unlike the ASR, a simple upgrade license can unlock the
boxes full potential.
Just my opinion as a customer of both vendors...
The MX80 license locked is not 5Gb
The MX5 is 20Gb TP - 20 SFP ports card, only one MIC slot active
The MX10 is 40Gb TP - 20 SFP ports card. both MIC slots active
The MX40 is 60Gb TP - 20 SFP ports card, both MIC slots + 2 of the onboard
10GbE ports
The MX80 is 80Gb TP - 20 SFP ports card, both MIC slots + all 4 of the
onboard 10GbE ports
The MX80-48T is 80Gb TP - 48 Copper ports, both MIC slots + all 4 of the
onboard 10GbE ports
Last year the licensed versions were called MX80-5G, MX8-10G and so on, but
as on this month they've renamed them to MX5, MX10, MX40's - note that the
old MX80 could come with or without -T timing support, the new ones ONLY
have timing.
…Skeeve
Thank you, that is great to know and have for reference.
Yeah, looking at this invoice from a a few months back, I have a "MX80
Promotional 5G Bundle for channels"... So I'm guessing that's now the MX5.
(I had assumed it was a mx80 in my response).
My first Juniper box ever, so forgive my confusion. As you might guess,
I'm only pushing ~3 gig through it... but am very happy with it so far.
ASR1002 list price is 18kUSD, MX5 list price is 29.5kUSD. Upgrade license
for MX5 -> MX80 literally costs more than new MX80 (with all but jflow
license, two psu and 20SFP MIC)
Sure MX5 will do line rate on 20 SFP ports, vastly more than ASR1002, but
this is little consolation if you need high touch services such as NAPT,
IPSEC etc. So applications for these boxes are quite different.
I certainly agree they have very different applications, and hopefully
that will help those looking for this kind of insight.
Except that some times, it did lead to crash (for us
anyway), because it eats up half the router's memory, and if
you're running 3x full tables or more, you ran out of the
other half and BOOM! And that was IOS XR 2, which is
generally old now.
We now turn off software redundancy now on all ASR1000 boxes
that don't have a 2nd RP.
Mark.
The thing the MX80 has that the ASR1000 is port density. You
get lots of Gig-E ports in there and a couple of 10Gbps
ports too. Not too bad.
The ASR1000 has an 8-port Gig-E card (called a SPA - Shared
Port Adapter) that offers the most dense Gig-E port capacity
in a single-height line card. There is a 10-port Gig-E SPA,
but that is a double-height unit, i.e., it eats up 2x slots.
10Gbps port density on the ASR1000 sucks a bit; there is
only a 1-port SPA, and no built-in 10Gbps ports unlike the
MX80. But on the other hand, the ASR1000 is great if you're
looking to throw in some non-Ethernet SPA's, e.g., serial,
E1, T1, SONET, SDH, e.t.c. The MX80 won't do this
efficiently today, and is really best deployed in Ethernet
scenarios.
Also, the MX80 can come with rather complicated licensing
structures even for the ports you want enabled, if you want
to take advantage of their cheaper offers. This can get
hairy.
Mark.
ASR 1000 does not run XR. You probably mean XE.
The high availability features that requires maintaining state and stateful switch over never seem to work out of the box on early releases and need some time until the feature gets mature. I've found this across different vendors.
The dual IOS process works best with two Routing Engines/ESPs on higher models. contact your local vendor engineering representatives asking them for more details on the the ASR1K High Availability features and they should tell you how it works in detail.
Regards,
Ahmed
Sent using BlackBerry® from mobinil
And this is something I've been telling Juniper for years
(not that they don't already know). The M7i and M10i have
really done all they can - but trying to get an Ethernet box
to do non-Ethernet things, while possible, is simply not
economically viable for operators (FlexWAN's, SIP's, MX
FPC's, anyone?).
They really need to solve this one.
The MX80 had no competition from Cisco, until the ASR9001
came out (and it supports 40Gbps line cards when they come
out).
Juniper are dropping the ball on this one. But hopefully,
they're busy in the lab building a decent ASR1000
challenger.
Mark.
ASR 1000 does not run XR. You probably mean XE.
Indeed, I did, as I clarified in some private responses as
well. I thought it would be obvious so I decided not to
publicly correct it :-).
The high availability features that requires maintaining
state and stateful switch over never seem to work out of
the box on early releases and need some time until the
feature gets mature. I've found this across different
vendors.
To be fair, I've only ever used SSO on the CRS and ASR1000;
fairly happy with those jobs. The same on a 6500 was an
utter fail, but we mostly kit those out with single SUP720's
anyway, so no point for SSO.
The rest of our Cisco is 7200's, which are just a single
control plane.
GRES on Juniper works pretty well, provided you understand
the caveats, e.g., Multicast isn't maintained across
failovers, e.t.c.
Other kinky HA features like ISSU for this or that protocol
is too sexy for us. BFD is as exotic as we'll get, plus a
little bit of IETF Graceful Restart (not NSR here).
The dual IOS process works best with two Routing
Engines/ESPs on higher models.
Well, if you have dual RP's, you don't need the dual IOS XE
software process then :-).
Mark.
They are competing in some things. There are differences that will make you choose ASR1000 over MX series, but alot of people are choosing either one of the other for many of the same jobs, mainly upgrading to straight-forward L3 1/10 gig aggregation. I know some people who've had ASR1000s and MXs on the plate and chose the MXs. I've also known some who's chosen the ASR1000s. It just really depends on what you need.
Actually something as an alternative to both I am researching is the Brocade MLX series. They have different, more efficient, and refreshing architecture; and phenomenal cost (half the cost of ASR1000/MX or less). Gonna do a trial shortly to see if it all lives up to the marketing or if its too good to be true. I also know some peer institutions who have dumped both Cisco and Juniper for Brocade's Ethernet/IP lines. Not a single bad word so far.
Matt