Cisco 5500 Series Network Convergence System (NCS 5500) vs. Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000)

Cloud based solutions, these need the necessary bandwidth going from point A to point B. Automate as much as possible from a WAN Core edge standpoint, take away the always on maintaining of the routers/switches on the network. Automation is extremely important in today's world. The Cisco 5500 Series Network Convergence System would not be a very viable solution for a small company, especially from a budgetary standpoint.

Incentivized

It is very well suited to act as your aggregator / core switch for mid to large facilities. it is flexible enough to really be useable in small environments but costs may hinder that. It has redundancy of power and management blades that does add a lot of peace of mind and security. Really the only reason you would not use a 9000 series is frankly cost and/or real requirements for performance. They have several versions of this model, plus they have an entire set of lines that can accommodate nearly as much as the 9000. Less demand or less of a budget can weigh in the decision to select this particular model.

Incentivized

• It is versatile due to the diversity in models and form factors.
• Low power consumption compared to similar models
• Mature operating system code allowing for quick production installation and configuration.

Incentivized

• [Cisco 9000] Series [Aggregation Services] Routers are exceptionally reliable when compared to other market options.
• One strength of Cisco routers, in general, is their compatibility with any standard market tools from other vendors.
• [It is] unmatched in terms of sheer performance.
• [It] comfortably supports very strong throughput requirements.

• Horizontal blade designs are rare these days because if the gear is shipped in a rack, the blade can bend. The NCS5500's blades are horizontal.
• Not a NCS5500 specific issue, but XR has a ways to go, but will continue to grow with customer input.

Incentivized

• [The] upgrade process [is] overly complicated compared to NX-OS or IOS. New images and the current configuration need to be compiled into "golden IOS's". If you don't include the configuration, you will have a clean device with no configuration.
• [There are] major bugs in every release. We have had to cycle through all of our routers 3 times in the last year for updates due to show-stopping bugs that did not come to light until after the changes were made in production.
• [It has] terrible documentation. You have to mine their site to get to any documentation for recent versions of IOS-XR. If you make the leap from 32-bit cXR to 64-bit eXR, then the documentation is more or less non-existent. Due to the internal architecture of hardware itself, technical specs can change from software version to software version, so don't expect any sort of firm scalability numbers. You'll have to rely on your sales engineer for that.

Incentivized

This depends on when Cisco EOL the product.

Incentivized

[I am] always impressed with Cisco products, from the functionality to the customer support.

Incentivized

Cisco support is always informative and reliable. Depending on the level of support you subscribe to, the techs and Cisco TAC are well versed in hardware and operating system of the NCS series routers. You can receive 24x7 support and either Next Business Day or 4-hour part replacement from Cisco if required.

Incentivized

In some ways, the platform is a big improvement over our previous IOS and NX-OS devices: They offer version-controlled configuration staging/commits. They have a robust portfolio of network protocols and features even beyond datacenter devices. Due to the use of NPUs instead of relying entirely on ASICs for forwarding, new versions of the software are able to improve hardware performance and capacity. Unfortunately, I have run into more bugs on IOS-XR than I ever did on IOS or even NX-OS (which has a shocking number of bugs of its own) and you have to be a licensing guru to get your order right the first time.

Incentivized

Ultimately other Arista and Juniper choices were tested but design and testing did not give much detail as to why these are better overall or in comparison. We are already using Cisco in this level of the topology so that was most likely the strongest reason and fit the application we are using it for.

When we are integrating the ASR9000 router with other devices then there should be the same device that can cater to the throughput. We can use the Cisco 9600 Switch which can be easily integrated and can handle the speed in terms of uplinks 40G can be handled. Adding to this Cisco DNA Center can be integrated to do the automation and monitoring purposes.

Incentivized

• 100% uptime for 5 years.
• No successful intrusion attempts in 5 years.
• Very high throughput has allowed for constant and reliable connectivity.

Incentivized

• We didn't need to buy new devices when we were increasing backbone capacity from 1G to 10G.
• Due to the modular nature of the software, when there is an issue with any running services, we need not reboot the whole device which affects all clients and availability.

Incentivized