Re: MPLS/MEF Switches and NIDs

[Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa>]

On 5/29/21 00:46, Colton Conor wrote:

> Yes, I was surprised as you that they have these routing features. I 
> was also surprised they had multiple boxes that compete with 
> aggregation devices like the ACX5048. The question is how good is 
> Ciena's MPLS, switching, and routing stack compared to the established 
> players of Juniper, Cisco, and Nokia? Ciena is no small company, so I 
> think they would have the resources to make it happen.

One of our last mile partners started their Metro-E network off of 
Ciena, years back. As it has grown, it has become unwieldy, and they are 
now culling the level of intelligence from their Ciena platforms and 
moving that over to Juniper MX's.

They will keep their Ciena devices, but relegate them to Access nodes, 
with T-LDP.

They do intend to continue considering use of LDP/RSVP with Ciena, but 
indicated that they will be looking for stable code that has plenty of 
bugs fixed, from their experience.

This is a fairly large network here in South Africa, which has been 
running Ciena for their core and access Metro-E infrastructure for over 
6 years now. From what they shared with us (in an effort to explain 
recent months of downtime), I'd approach with caution.

Mark.