Greetings,
I am looking for some suggestions on alternatives to mx204.
Any recommendations on something more affordable which can handle full routing tables from two providers?
Prefer Juniper but happy to look alternatives.
Min 6-8 10G ports are required
1G support required
Thanks in advance!
Mehmet
Nokia 7750 sr-1.
Thank you! Something within 2U (max) form factor 
It’s a bit more expensive and higher capability (1.2tb vs 400G) than the MX204. But the form factor and capability is very impressive for a little box.
Extreme (ex Brocade) SLX9540 will do full tables from a couple providers in a local edge scenario with their "OptiScale" FIB optimization/route caching, but the whole FIB won't fit in hardware. Bandwidth is very generous (up to 48x10G + 6x100G), and prices are reasonable. You wouldn't need any of the stupid port licenses, just the advanced feature license, so it should be about 25-40% more than an MX204 based on public pricing I've seen. That would get you 24x10G + 24x1G (the rest of the hardware is all there just locked out).
The SLX9650 will supposedly (if marketing and my SEs are to believed) do 4M IPv4 in hardware FIB, less if you want IPv6, too but still full tables of both with ample room for L2 MACs, next-hops, and MPLS. Bandwidth is, well, "Extreme" at I think 24x25G + 12x100G (25G breakout capable, all 25G also capable of 1G/10G). Pricing is supposedly "about double" a 9540.
Be advised that the control plane SOFTWARE is NOT as mature as JunOS. It's being built up rapidly, but there's still a lot of stuff missing. I have not, so far, run into any of the weird glitches that I've seen on older Foundry/Brocade products, though, so that's good. There's also no oddball restrictions about port provisioning like the MX204 has. Control plane HARDWARE is well more than capable with something like 16GB (or maybe 32?) of RAM and a Xeon CPU. There's actually a fully supported option for a guest VM for local analytics, SDN, etc. in remote scenarios.
If you just want to push packets, they're nice boxes. If you want "high touch" service provider features, I think you may find them lacking. They're worth looking at, though, if only because of the price/performance ratio.
Arista has some similar boxes with similar caveats in terms of infantile software.
MX204 is a very nice pizza box router for service providers. I'm not aware of anything quite like it in terms of having a mature control plane. I like the JunOS config language better than Cisco-style that most other folks use.
Thank you! Very useful
Certainly i have concerns about the software as well
If it’s not for an US company, then a Huawei NE-20 could be in order. The entry model fits 2U.
Rubens
If you don't require redundant routing engines, there is nothing from Juniper that will cost less and have the capacity you require. In fact, there really aren't any cheaper MX options at all, other than the kneecapped MX80 and MX104 variants. MX204 is really a nice box. I only wish they had a redundant version.
Is price your only concern with the MX204? You might not need the full blown -R or -IR version, so the list price would only be ~$45K.
I'm not too familiar with other vendors, so I'll leave that to others.
thanks,
-Randy
45k? No no, the mx204 with enough license to do BGP is more like 20k - 25k or less. It is actually quite cheap, so I doubt the OP will find anything much cheaper without going used or do a software router.
I feel it should be mentioned that a Linux box with 4x10G NIC and some random switch as port expander also will be able to fulfil the requirements and for a fraction of any other solution.
Regards
Baldur
tor. 8. aug. 2019 06.47 skrev Randy Carpenter <rcarpen@network1.net>:
~$45k is the US list price… typical discount applies
Hi,
SR1 (without s) is 2u high, bit it doesn't have 1G ports. It doesn't even have "native" 10G ports. Only 40/100G, with 4x10G optics for 10G. For 1G you would need a 7210 in sattelite mode, which is one extra U + $$$.
Otherwise very nice box...
I am not certain on the value of having 1GbE interfaces natively on a $25k plus router in the year 2019. Pair the router with a nice 1RU 1/10GbE switch installed directly next to it with full metro Ethernet layer 2 feature set.
Anything that needs a 1GbE inteface, attach it to that switch, give the switch a single 10GbE port to the router, and create the 1Gbps on the router as a subinterface.
We have reached the point in 10GbE being so low cost that it should really be the minimum port size for a lot of things. I recently bought an Intel chipset two port SFP+ daughtercard for a Dell server (part c63dv for an old r720) on eBay for $40.
No-one has mentioned it yet, so for completeness big C have the ASR 9901
(not 9001) with traditional router bits in it.
A portion of the 10G ports on it are capable of 1/10G.
Regards,
Yes, good point, I was under the impression that it would take the 12 port
10/1 mda-e card but on looking closer it appears it only supports the high
capacity mda-e-xp (6x100/40/10 ports or 12x100/40/10 ports) cards. This
means, as you say if you want physical 10G or lower ports then a
7210-sas-sx64 would be needed which is less than ideal.
hey,
This > means, as you say if you want physical 10G or lower ports then a>
7210-sas-sx64 would be needed which is less than ideal.
Or you could talk to your account team, there are some new MDAs coming for IOM-5 and SR-1 that might suit the 10G/1G requirements without breakout or satellite.
One thought could be any of the virtual ones, vmx, nokia vsr, etc on lannerinc hardware.
Cheep scalable and has all the interface options
Hello
How about Juniper vMX? 8x 10G is no problem in a 2U server. Two Intel X710 NICs with 4 interfaces on each.
I found this guide:
https://gbe0.com/networking/juniper/vmx/ubuntu-14-04-kvm-host-setup-for-juniper-vmx
Regards
Baldur
VMX (and VSR) throughput capacity pricing is excessive once you get over about 20G from what I have seen.
No-one has mentioned it yet, so for completeness big C have the ASR 9901
Weren't we talking about "decently priced" ?
(not 9001) with traditional router bits in it.
9001, while approaching EoL, can be a good solution if your needs are limited : 8x10G + 20x1G, you should get it for a good price - refurbished.
> No-one has mentioned it yet, so for completeness big C have the ASR 9901
Weren't we talking about "decently priced" ?
ASR9901 and MX204 being wildly differently priced is market
inefficiency. It's difficult for me to see, how CSCO could justify the
premium for any volume order. Either sell at market or lose sale.
> (not 9001) with traditional router bits in it.
9001, while approaching EoL, can be a good solution if your needs are limited : 8x10G + 20x1G, you should get it for a good price - refurbished.
Also it will never run eXR. I have no information, but I think it's
reasonable to suspect the OS not being sold may receive decreasing
amount of NRE. I wouldn't certainly spend my time writing code for
product I'm not selling.