[AusNOG] Cisco 6500 with Sup 720 3BXL - Good routing platform ??

[Alex Pinto]

Dear AusNog
 
I’m looking at setting up a new pop site with 2 x Cisco 6509 each unit will have 2 x WS-SUP720-3BXL, with upgraded flash and 1GB of memory on each supervisor. We will have 10 upstream providers and do a fair bit of BGP. The combination of hardware above will do a total of 40bgits per slot, or a total of 720gbits across each complete unit. From a packet point of view each 6509 will do 400 million packets per second for IPv4 and 200 million packets per second for IPv6 all hardware processed.
 
Compared to the typical Cisco 7200 platform with a NPE G2 which only does 2 million packets per second the 6509 platform offers some serious performance difference…. So what’s the catch ?? other than physical size ? and the fact the 6500 is a few years old ?
 
The investment will be a good $30k per unit (before shopping around for a good price)
Is anyone else running this setup, how do you find it, and is it worth investing in a 6500 technology or something else ?
 
The Juniper MX80 with 65 million packets per second, or the MX240 with 360 million packets per second also seem like good options, but at 150k per device it’s a much larger investment which is hard to justify when the 6500 platform seems so attractive.
 
Thanks for your help and advice in advance
 
Alex 		 	   		  
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