Anyone using Alcatel-Lucent routers (professionally) ?

[Gryz]

Normally I only answer questions in this forum. But now I have a question of my own.

Does any of you here use Alcatel-Lucent's Service-Routers ?

Those are professional routers. Used by ISPs and telcos. They aren't even targeted towards large enterprises. So the average AnandTech user will not deal with them ever. But maybe some of you have worked with them anyway. Alcatel-Lucent is now number two in that market. Behind cisco still, but they overtook Juniper. And Huawei is trailing a lot further behind. But despite the objective success of ALU, it seems there isn't a lot of talk about these routers.

If you work with ALU routers, what do you think about them ?
Just curious.

PS. Next week I'll have to change the title of this post. Alcatel-Lucent will become Nokia.

 

[dailow]

Yes - have working experience with the ALU 7450 switch and 7750 service router as well as Juniper routers.

I feel that the ALU platform is ahead of Cisco for managing converged network architectures because of the concept of a service ID, which feels really clunky trying to manage in Cisco IOS.

Provisioning services is really easy with ALU as well. Assuming that your network is connected via MPLS backbone, all you need to do is pick two endpoints and the system will automatically create an MPLS tunnel on the backend to connect the two endpoints together.

My biggest gripe about ALU is the lack of historical throughput information available directly on the box. I realize you could probably get the information via their equivalent of NetFlow, but that's a bit besides the point. You can get the information on demand with a minimum 11 second interval, but it's a bit of an annoyance coming from Cisco where you can get the same information right away with a simple "show interface" command.

Each platform has its own pros and cons, but this is all I can come up with at the moment since I haven't really given the question much thought in the past. It might just be a case of rolling with whatever's in the network and getting accustomed to it.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I feel dirty for reading this thread a second time. I had experience with Lucent before it courted Alcatel. Same for Alcatel. Not a lot of ALU in my company compared to 'the other guys' so its getting increasing more difficult to retain such knowledge--especially when companies become assimilated and a half decade or more time passes. Remember companies like Redback, Nortel, etc.?

 

[Gryz]

Thanks for your answer, Dailow. Good to hear you like these routers. I am not sure I understand your commend about the historical throughput information. The alcatels don't show you the "5-minute throughput" in the "show interface" command ? On alcatel-routers each interface is purely logical. And logically paired with a "port". Isn't there a "show port" command that shows you throughput ?

BarkingGhostar, I am not sure I understand any of your answer. Why do you feel dirty ?

And Alcatel doesn't seem to be on its way back, like Nortel and Redback. Last I heard, Alcatel is gaining market-share. Their boxes had higher port-density than cisco and Juniper until recently. Cisco and Juniper leap-frogged Alcatel again earlier this year. But I'm sure Alcatel's new hardware will leap-frog cisco & Juniper soon again. In the mean time, Alcatel overtook Juniper in the router-market, and is in second place.

I suspect they sell a lot to telcos and ISPs. And not much to enterprises. As a result, their presence seems much smaller. They also seem to sell more outside the US. And the readers on this forum seems mostly from the US.

But I was just curious. They got 20% market-share for routers at ISPs and telcos. And you don't find them mentioned much on the Internet in general (forums, mailing-lists, blogs, etc). Weird.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I don't work with them but we have some in our CO for a FTTH deployment. I have not heard anything negative about them and they've been chugging away since they were installed. I'm not sure what models they are exactly. They may not even be routers... I know there's Cisco gear in that rack too. I don't think any of the equipment in there is running at IP level other than management, so I think it's mostly all muxing

 

[Pandasaurus]

I wasn't aware that Alcatel-Lucent (or Nokia, for that matter) really had a market share in terms of IP networks. I'd be interested in getting my hands on some of their gear.

 

[Gryz]

I believe Nokia does not sell any IP-equipment. Maybe a firewall. Their networking is mostly about phone-switches, towers for mobile phones, 4G and wireless equipment, etc. Nokia sold all of their mobile-phone business-unit to Microsoft a few years ago. Nokia used that money to buy Alcatel-Lucent. Their first interest was some wireless stuff. But Alcatel's IP-Division (the routers) has been doing pretty well the last few years.

I'm not sure if I can talk more about their Service-Routers here. In fear of being accused of advertisement. What I heard from them, and what I read on the net is that cisco still has 40% of the router market, Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper have ~20% and Huawei 12%. And ALU has overtaken Juniper recently. I do not know however, if these numbers are for all routers, or only routers at ISPs and Telcos. ALU's Service-Routers used to be deployed mainly at the edge (customer-aggregation also called subscriber-management). But in recent years their core router (the 7950 XRS) has gained popularity. (E.g British Telecom's IP-backbone is all ALU). I don't think their routers are very populair in Enterprises yet. And maybe not even in the datacenter (not sure). They do have an SDN-product (called Nuage), so maybe they do more stuff in the datacenter than I am aware of.

I can't find any pie-charts about market-share in 2015 on the net. Only stuff like this.

When I google for networking stuff, or read blogs about networking, ALU is not mentioned a lot. It's all about cisco, and a little about Juniper. I think their marketing could improve here. I was curious what AT-readers thought.

 

[dailow]

Thanks for your answer, Dailow. Good to hear you like these routers. I am not sure I understand your commend about the historical throughput information. The alcatels don't show you the "5-minute throughput" in the "show interface" command ? On alcatel-routers each interface is purely logical. And logically paired with a "port". Isn't there a "show port" command that shows you throughput ?

Correct - the ALU devices do not show throughput with the "show port" command. All it tells you is whether or not you have incrementing input/output packets. If you want to take a look at throughput, you can do it on demand via "monitor port" commands.

One neat thing about the ALU software platform is that you can have a dedicated database that houses global routing policies that are then pushed out to each individual switch/router as they're required. It's a bit of a double-edged sword though - you can imagine how powerful and dangerous it is when you can potentially push out a change to every single ALU device in your network at the same time.