[AusNOG] Juniper vs Cisco vs Brocade - what's best for BGP routing?

[Chris Ricks]

Hi all,

We use gear from all three vendors mentioned, but we've only use Juniper
gear for BGP duties to date. I'm not going to make a recommendation, but
instead give some honest observations from our experiences.

We accept a few domestic-only transit tables and the memory usage for
these tables is surprising given my past encounters with other routers -
I've seen Cisco 7206 boxes handle 2 full transit tables and a few IX
tables in the same memory as the Juniper gear handles 2 domestic-only +
default route tables.

Juniper gear (in our experience) tends to do one thing very well. By
that I mean that if a JunOS instance is tasked with one of switching,
security or routing the outcomes are good. Stacking two of these
functions can be problematic and seemingly requires regular reboots of
devices (JSRP is really a non-negotiable for firewall and/or routers -
VC is the same for switching).  That said, the JSRP failover for BGP
isn't perfect, and you should expect to see convergence time on failover.

One concerning outcome we have seen is the current fracturing of the
JunOS feature base. The "single OS" promise Juniper promotes is
currently problematic - we have multiple JunOS devices fulfilling
switching, routing and firewall duties and the disparity of recommended
JunOS versions between them has grown over the last 12 - 24 months.

With those points in mind, the fact that you have a fairly complete BSD
environment on each JunOS box is a big deal - scripting, inspection and
problem solving skills come across well for System Admins, the
versioning of configuration is a welcome and cheap safety net and we're
yet to see interoperability problems with a significant number of other
vendors and environments.

We welcome questions on or off list if anyone has them.

Regards,

Chris

On 11/12/2013 4:46 PM, Andrew White wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> I've recently set up my own AS and I'm looking at broadcasting my own
> BGP. I'm wanting to find some decent hardware at a reasonable price to
> do so.
>
> The same router will also run my servers (about 50 VMs/3 physical
> boxes) and have to deal with multiple upstream providers (two
> currently, but more to come at my DC).
>
> I also want something that can hold a big BGP routing table.
>
> When I was first getting into networking, Cisco was "the big thing".
> Now I look at the market and Junipers seem really common for the
> cheaper end of the market. I've seen Brocades too - I think they may
> be out of my price range, but I'm not sure if they're worth the money
> or if there's a huge benefit.
>
> I've been tossing up over a few Huawei models which are really, really
> cheap!
>
> I don't know a ton about the hardware side of things and I'm sure
> there are others on the list with a similar level of knowledge to me.
> I'm happy for any vendor contacts, and I'm sure replies on list would
> be appreciated for other people to learn about this too!
>
> Thanks guys!
>
> Andrew
>
>
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