Cisco 500 Series Network Convergence System (NCS 500) vs. Juniper MX Series

Well suited for10G aggregation at network edge. Small managed networks such as school districts or distributed enterprise campus. Not well suited to RPHY aggregation at network core — queuing in NCS540 results in jitter and poor RPHY performance. Allow port license purchases in smaller units. Better support for SLA performance monitoring capabilities would allow use as a box for 10G aggregation for Carrier Ethernet NNI handoff.

Incentivized

It is well suited as a WAN/Internet Edge device. It is easy to configure BGP, contexts and routing instances. Its suite of tools has saved our organization money by being able to provide services (tag stacking, for example) that our provider would normally charge us more for. Due to interface cost this would not be appropriate as a LAN aggregation device.

Incentivized

• Switching.
• Routing.
• Access.

Incentivized

• It's a robust platform, very resilient. It handles large traffic flows well.
• It's a flexible architecture, it can be configured with provider or enterprise options (or both!)
• It has an excellent versioning system, simple commit/confirm/rollback procedures!

Incentivized

• MPLS feature set on NCS520
• Full support for RFC2544, Y.1564 across the product line
• Greater clarity of the impact of smaller buffers on NCS540 when compared to other Qumran chipsets — some use cases like RPHY aggregation at network core are not a good fit.

Incentivized

• Sometimes I wish that documentation was more robust, complete, though this has been improved of late.
• It would be nice if netflow was easier to configure.
• It would be nice if the platform was cheaper.

Incentivized

Cisco NCS is smaller and for us newer. Better cost with similar capabilities.

Incentivized

We preferred Juniper over Cisco for our WAN/Internet routing needs for a number of reasons. First was the price, the Juniper offering was much more competitive than Cisco's. Secondly, was feature set, Juniper's implementation of routing protocols, routing tables, and forwarding options are better thought-out than Cisco's (not to mention Juniper's longstanding use of commit/confirm/rollback features, which Cisco has only started to use recently, and only on some of their products).

Incentivized

• Relatively low cost access layer device.
• Very cost effective means of getting 10G interfaces.
• Some features available on other devices out of the box are more complex or absent on the NCS without licensing or assistance.

Incentivized

• Its flexible architecture and configuration styles has saved our organization money by providing feature we would have otherwise needed to purchase from our ISPs.
• It has a long and healthy lifecycle, with potential upgrades for more performance if needed. (This helps alleviate the downtime associated with chassis replacement.)
• The only drawback is some of the highest throughput interfaces are expensive.

Incentivized