Cisco 900 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR)
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
The Cisco 900 Series Industrial ISR (IR 900) series of routers are designed with an open platform to build a highly secure, reliable, and scalable field network infrastructure.
N/A
Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000)
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000) are designed to support carrier edge networks.
N/A
Pricing
Cisco 900 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR)
Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco 900 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR)
Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000)
Cisco 900 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR)
Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000)
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
No problems with any of the Cisco 900 Series [Integrated Services Routers] (ISR) platform features within the enterprise environment. Because these devices are running a version of IOS-XE as opposed to traditional IOS, some of the more 'basic' configurations can become more complex. In the end, the 900 Series is still able to provide the required functionality, but there is a learning curve.
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.
[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.
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.
I have similar feelings about the NCS 5500 Series Router. IOS-XR is great, but the need to upgrade components to support newer features seems like a planning oversight. 400G Linecards are great and needed.... but they need all new power supplies? Really? Also, the ability to use lags across multiple linecards would be nice. I'm pretty sure that's not available, but that is more understandable.
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.
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.
