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"Their most recent model has 8x10Gb ports, costs USD $2,500 and will route the full 80gb/s" No, it won't route 80Gbps, because any single flow on a CCR uses a single core on their multi core Tilera CPUs. The CCRs struggle to really do 10Gbps of real world IP transit traffic. If you're pushing 5Gbps+ of your customers' IP traffic in a daily sine wave pattern to/from upstream and adjacent BGP peers (paid IP transit and peering at a local IX), and have $2,500 to spend, you will be MUCH better off buying a proper routing platform that has things like hotswap fan trays, hotswap 1+1 or N+1 power supplies, redundant hotswap routing engines, etc. You can do this with a used/refurb Cisco or Juniper for the same price as the higher end Mikrotiks. I can build a Cisco 7604 or 7606 with dual RSP720 for less than $2000. The CCRs have a single motherboard in them that is about the same quality as a $85 PC motherboard. If you're running an ISP that is moving multi-Gbps of customer traffic and have potentially thousands of singlehomed customers downstream of you, do you want to rely on a 'core' router that has absolutely zero hardware redundancy? Mikrotiks have their place at edge and small aggregation but when you start talking about things that are $2,000+, please, buy a real router. |
I can buy 3 CCR routers and run OSPF/BGP/etc... on them to provide redundancy. The likelyhood of all 3 failing at once is slim and I'm still an order of magnitude cheaper than an equivalent Cisco/Juniper setup. Yes, dynamic routing takes a few seconds to converge, so an unplanned failure will result in a short disruption in connectivity, but planned maintenance can be done seamlessly, including power supply replacement(since only one model has hot-swappable power supplies). I do not deploy any single-power models and have not had a single router fail in the 2 years I have been deploying them. I have had a $6500 Cisco ASA fail, twice.
I am a fan of all 3. Cisco and Juniper make great equipment. So does Mikrotik. Each one is a tool that must be used properly and the right one needs to be selected for the job and requirements.