ASR 1000 or 6500 switches

[Haris P]

Dears ,

We have requirement for our ISP Edge , We were planning to go for ASR 1000 or 6500 switch .We have currently the upstreams providers connected thru Gigabit Fibre (LX/LH) and the traffic on each interface is about 1 Gig . To the upstream we have only simple BGP and we are receiving only default route .We are looking for a solution which can scale up to 10Gig .

What's the best ? ASR 1000 or Cisco 6500 switches .

I will rate the good suggetions

Regards

Haris

[Giuseppe Larosa]

Hello Haris,

until you receive only a default route on the EBGP session with ISP only the forwarding plane matters.

A typical Catalyst 6500 with Sup720 3B or more is even too much it can host one or more linecards with 2 or 8 Tengiga each.

This is a good choice if you already have it and you are using it for other purposes instead of having a dedicated border router-

On the other hand you need at least an ASR 1004 that has performance between 10 to 20 Gbps so it can reach a 10GE link (but only one to the ISP and one to internal network at best).

Instead a sup720 has a 720 Gbps switching fabric (just to give a term of comparison).

ASR 1004 will give you enough memory and BGP capability to use it also as a BGP route-reflector if needed.

Also the ASR 1004 can perform encryption without adding hardware for its ESP processors.

see

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps9343/data_sheet_c78-447652.html

With a C6500 using a Sup 720 3BXL or better you could also receive a BGP full table (up to 3, we use them in our DMZ).

To take a decision you should think at what can be the scenario in the mid-term and also it depends from the current setup: the c6500 option could mean removing the dedicated border router and using it also for other tasks.

You have more raw performance and scalability on the c6500 side, more functionalities on the ASR1004 side.

For example the ASr1004 can be more powerful as a firewall then a FWSM on a Cat6500 just to mention one aspect.

The C6500 can have a very great forwarding performance but for firewall operation only the performance of the blade counts (ACE blade is more powerful then FWSM that can treat 2,5 Gbps traffic bidirectional )

For your current scenario I would go to C6500 if not using firewall features.

Hope to help

Giuseppe

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Perhaps a better choice than the 6500 would be the 7600. Even though your handoff will be Ethernet fiber, the 6500's Ethernet ports are more LAN feature oriented while the 7600 offers Ethernet cards with more WAN oriented features. It also can support much more growth then the ASR and has a longer history. However, I would expect a correctly sized ASR to work well and might cost much less.

If you know you're not going to need advanced IOS features, you might consider other L3 switches that support 10 gig ports, e.g. 3560-E, 3750-E, 4948-10G, ME 4924-10GE.