Cisco 5000 Series Network Convergence System (NCS 5000) vs. Juniper MX Series

The best scenario for us was to use the NCS 5000 for video conferencing. With several remote branches, we required reliable bandwidth for remotely connecting with employees. The NCS 5000 delivered the bandwidth we needed and provided the quality even with some low bandwidth sites.

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

• Higher port density allows for both higher bandwidth ports to the customer network as well as sufficient uplink capacity to the core.
• Small rack space, smarter design, smaller footprint allows for more hardware the fit in the same amount of rack space.
• Lower power consumption, less heat output results in savings within the data center environment.

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

• Bugs
• Transport components stability
• Tac response time in some xases

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

CAPEX and OPEX are less for NCS routers.

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

• Communication among remote employees and branches has increased.
• Quality of service from cloud and video applications.

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