> > 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.
The 2 boxes not having exactly the same port count and features(9901 can do - or is suppose to be able to do - subscriber stuff - IPoE,PTA,LAC), this explains the difference. Add the fact that Cisco has customers that buy "Cisco and nothing else".
And not everybody buys "enough" in order to get acceptable volume discounts.
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.
I would recommend the SLX9640. 12x 100G and 24x 1G/10G ports. 4 million routes in hardware without compression. We've gotten 5.7M in there with compression. Price point is super good. Push them and they will get very aggressive on price. VERY aggressive.
Assuming one can find a used mx204, what is the official juniper licensing policy?
It looks like I’m going to be replacing our core cisco in the not too distant future due to running out of fib entries, and am looking at options. Am I reading the specs correctly that the mx204 should handle typical internet routing table growth for the next few years?
Out of curiosity, what are you doing that has 5.7M routes in a single routing area? That's a lot of edge routes, tons of VRFs, or something.
Push them and they will get very aggressive on price. VERY aggressive.
Yes, yes they will. I've seen some distributor pricing and, while not officially under NDA, I will not mention it directly. Suffice to say you should demand at least 40-50% off list from your vendor to start with.
Out of curiosity, what are you doing that has 5.7M routes in a single routing area? That's a lot of edge routes, tons of VRFs, or something.
They were generated just for testing.
Push them and they will get very aggressive on price. VERY aggressive.
Yes, yes they will. I've seen some distributor pricing and, while not officially under NDA, I will not mention it directly. Suffice to say you should demand at least 40-50% off list from your vendor to start with.
I don't believe I'm under NDA either but all I'll say is that if you push, 40-50% isn't even close to what they'll do.
I have to agree with Eric here. 1G should be relegated elsewhere. If you ask for something that does all these speeds you will soon ask for 10m and that’s a wide range.
I would go with a 72q and if something needs 1G then add a switch or similar. Something like that Arista 7050 while EOL will cover this well and can be had for cheap.
I've found that if Cisco is presented with competing quotes for
comparable equipment (eg. MX204 versus ASR9901) then they have inventive
to price their products competitively. That said, a lot of SP's in the
Canadian market are moving to the MX204 because of the pricing and Cisco
was late to ingest that fact internally.
You'll note I said "start". As in, laugh at any vendor who doesn't immediately give you at least that much off. As Aaron mentioned, they'll go quite a ways beyond that if you let them know that you are familiar with actual, competitive market pricing factors.
The MX204 is pretty hard to beat. It fits well as a peering/transit
router, as well as a Metro-E router where you need a 100Gbps ring to
carry 10Gbps customers, as well as downstream cheaper routers that will
do sub-10Gbps quite nicely.
That said, at least for the Metro, I still believe a lighter version of
the MX204, with dense 1Gbps capability, is still needed. Been asking
since 2007.
The MX80 and MX104 have no business being in any modern conversation these days :-). For what you could do with it, the MX204 is pretty neat. Juniper have never really considered the Metro in a serious way, because if they did, they’d have an MX204-1G (if you can call it that). They’ve lost plenty of ground to Cisco’s ASR920 (and older MX3600X) on the back of this. Mark.
That's what we do for Metro-E rings that require 10Gbps to customers.
Use an MX204 to upgrade the ring to 100Gbps, hand an ASR920 on one of
the MX204 10Gbps ports, and feed 1Gbps customers from the Cisco.
I think the Baldur's proposal works for organisation with few and
highly skilled employees. But for larger organisation the CAPEX isn't
relevant, it's the OPEX that matters and managing that magic linux box
is going to be very OPEX heavy.
Also XEON isn't cheap chip, Jericho/PE/Trio/Solar/FP all are cheaper,
significantly so. XEON does cover some segment of the market, but it's
not large one.
What about handling LAG on 1Gb/sec links? That is a major showstopper if indeed it is missing:
https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/junos/topics/reference/configuration-statement/speed-gigether-options.html
• On MX10003 and MX204 routers, rate selectability at PIC level and port level does not support 1-Gbps speed.
• On MX10003 and MX204 routers, the interface name prefix must be xe.
• On MX10003 and MX204 routers, even after configuring 1-Gbps speed, the protocol continues to advertise the bandwidth as 10-Gigabit Ethernet.
• On MX10003 and MX204 routers, Link Aggregation Group (LAG) is supported on 10-Gbps speed only. It is not supported on 1-Gbps speed.
That said, in the Metro, we don't generally support LAG's toward
customers because getting policing to work reliably on them is
difficult. So we wouldn't hit this issue, although I can see how
annoying it would be for networks that prefer to do this.