Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review As an edge/WAN router that contains internet BGP routes, it handles this work very well. And the devices are robust, able to manage a significant load. However, the interface cost can be somewhat of a hindrance when wanting to use it to interconnect many metro clients.
Read full review Pros [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. Read full review Version tracking/rollback Logical configuration layout Verbose status/logs for troubleshooting purposes Flexible configuration styles (carrier vs enterprise) Read full review Cons [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. Read full review I would like to able to find more examples of configs. Given the multiple ways to configure the same setting, having a little more documentation would be helpful. I wish the FPCs and interfaces were cheaper. Read full review Likelihood to Renew This depends on when Cisco EOL the product.
Read full review Usability [I am] always impressed with Cisco products, from the functionality to the customer support.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Juniper support is friendly, easy to understand, widely knowledgeable, and easy to get ahold of. I did not give them a higher rating as some of my more complex issues, were solved by myself while under consultation from Juniper TAC.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review The simplicity, elegance, and robustness of Juniper's solution make it much easier to troubleshoot and configure, when compared to
Cisco Routers , especially considering Cisco's implementation of BGP (why are IPv4 and IPv6 linked in Cisco configuration?). Furthermore, the implementation of commit and rollback cannot be understated when compared to the Cisco solutions. This feature is a huge time saver when attempting to troubleshoot and remote configuration instances.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review The stability and robustness of this solution provide a rock-solid foundation for all of our internet traffic. The easy to use rollback and commit features simplifies remote administration and configuration, alleviating the need to travel to remote installation sites. Read full review ScreenShots