[afnog] GE Interfaces for Cisco 7206 and 7204

[Mark Tinka]

On Wednesday 22 October 2008 16:03:52 Rudasingwa Peter 
wrote:

> I am planning to do an upgrade on in my network and I am
> thinking of purchasing GE Interfaces for my cisco 7206
> and Cisco 7204 routers. I have checked around the net and
> I came up with "*CISCO 7200 SERIES NETWORK PROCESSING
> ENGINE NPE-G1 *"
> (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/modules/ps393
>1/product_data_sheet09186a00800c6bd6.html).
>
> I would like to know if this would work for me. If not,
> can you please advise on the best module to use?

The NPE-G1 (and it's newer brother, the NPE-G2) is a great 
way to have Gig-E ports on the 7200-VXR routers.

One of the biggest advantages of this processor is that it 
integrates the function of an I/O controller (management 
plane) with the forwarding engine. This saves you from 
having to fill up your I/O controller slot, freeing up 
precious bandwidth points.

The integrated Gig-E ports, also, do not count toward the 
chassis' overall bandwidth points consumption. This leaves 
you with enough room to expand the router's density via the 
front slots.

If you have the cash, I'd recommend going for the NPE-G2. If 
not, the NPE-G1 will do just fine provided your 
requirements are not heavy, i.e., number of full BGP routes 
to handle, amount of traffic to forward, packet-inspecting 
features like ACL's and QoS, e.t.c.

> One more question:
> Are there modules of the same kind with interfaces with
> RJ45 connectors and not fiber connectors? I would like to
> be able to connect from any core device to the GE
> modules.

Both the NPE-G1 and NPE-G2 provide options for either RJ-45 
(copper) or GBIC/SFP (fibre). So if you don't want to use 
fibre, that's not a problem - you can still use copper.

However, note that each controller/port supports 
an "either-or" situation, i.e., you can run either copper 
or fibre, but not both at the same time.

Both the NPE-G1 and NPE-G2 provide you with 3x copper/fibre 
Gig-E ports. The NPE-G2 has an additional FE port, but 
that's built for OoB (Out of Band) management, and is not 
recommended to be used for forwarding user traffic.

Cheers,

Mark.
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