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

[David Hughes]

On 19/09/2010, at 1:15 PM, Alex Pinto wrote:

> 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 Cat6k is a solid hardware forwarding platform if you just need to switch packets.  If you need to do anything other than just switch packets (i.e count them, filter them, bill them, mark them, nat them, tweak them in any way) then you'd be wise to look elsewhere.  I've run lots of them and you do learn to work around all the failings of the platform, but if I was starting from scratch I'd pick something that didn't have as many failings to work around :)


David
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