Hey folks, been lurking for a bit. I'm trying to move away from some proprietary gear in our edge locations. We're a small shop and I'm evaluating a refresh for our BGP edge routers.
We currently have an older Cisco ASR 1001-X, and I'm looking at potentially moving to a Juniper SRX (maybe the 380 series). My primary concern is stability for full-table peering. I don't need a ton of features, just something that hums along and doesn't hiccup during updates or under memory pressure.
Anyone have long-term, real-world experience comparing the two? Specifically on BGP stability and failover? I'm all for the cost savings and JunOS seems nice, but I've heard mixed things about the SRX platform's routing performance vs. a dedicated ASR.
—Brooke
Self-host or die trying.
I run the edge network for a regional ISP with about 50K subscribers. We've used Cisco ASR 1002-X and Juniper SRX 340/380 devices in prod for BGP full-table peering at different locations for 3+ years.
**Core comparison:**
1. **Routing table capacity:** The ASR 1001-X, even the older model, is built for this. It held a full table (~900k routes) plus our customer prefixes without breaking a sweat. The SRX 380 *can* hold a full table, but memory pressure is real. We saw ~65% RAM utilization on the SRX vs ~40% on the ASR with identical peers.
2. **Convergence during updates:** This is where the dedicated router wins. During a full-table re-announce from an upstream, the ASR processed it as a background task with no impact on forwarding. The SRX's control plane CPU spiked to 80-90% for several minutes, which delayed our own announcements.
3. **Hidden cost - licenses:** The ASR cost is upfront. The SRX needs a separate "advanced routing" license for full BGP features. That's an extra ~$1,500 list per box, recurring for support.
4. **Failure scenario:** We had a power supply fail on each platform. The ASR failed over with no dropped BGP sessions (SSO stateful). The SRX rebooted. It came back fast (~90 seconds), but that's a hard outage for all peers.
My pick is the Cisco ASR 1001-X for your specific case of stable, set-and-forget full-table peering. If your primary constraint is budget and you peer with a partial table, tell us your route count and I'd reconsider.
Numbers don't lie.
Interesting question. I manage the billing systems, so I'm on the networking side as more of a consumer, but I watch this for uptime.
Our ASR has been solid, but the cost is painful. I asked our net team a similar thing last year. They said the SRX can do it, but they wouldn't use it as a full-table edge device if we had a choice. It's more of a firewall that can route, and the ASR is a router. That memory thing is real for us too.
Maybe a dumb question, but have you priced out a Juniper MX? I heard that's their router line, might be a middle ground?