This is a very interesting win for ALU. Winning Qwest or any other major SP backbone is certainly an accomplishment, and demonstrates just how far ALU has come (from edge to core).
As for your comment that " Qwest seems to have tried just about everybody in the core" is concerned I don't find that very productive (not sure what your point is). Are you implying that major SPs should give all of their core backbone business to one vendor? Back in the day Avici was used by several carriers including AT&T (who also used Cisco, etc). If you are implying that Juniper, Cisco, and Avici make up "just about everybody", you are partially correct. It would appear that you need to add ALU to the list. It's not a very crowded list to begin with now is it.
What does multi-chassis buy you? One control plane managing a lot more ports? Saving ports connecting multiple routers together? I've heard the vendor-side story. I'd like to hear the provider-side story.
Does multi-chassis trump big fat pipes? E.g., if I have router with, say 32 100GE ports in a rack, and you have a router with 160 10GE ports in one shelf filling half a rack, and you can connect two shelves together, taking up one rack, which would be preferable? Both provide 3.2 Tbps in a rack in different ways.
I know this isn't an apples to apples comparison, but I am interested in how the provider would prioritize their needs.
Multi-chassis scaling, interesting and who is using that today? Do these multi-chassis systems also have 100GigE interfaces? Juniper might, Cisco doesn't. How does the presence of 100GigE interfces change the dynamic of these multi-chassis systems?
I don't know, but I suspect that the market for multi-chassis systems isn't very large..
This is a very interesting win for ALU. Winning Qwest or any other major SP backbone is certainly an accomplishment, and demonstrates just how far ALU has come (from edge to core).
As for your comment that " Qwest seems to have tried just about everybody in the core" is concerned I don't find that very productive (not sure what your point is). Are you implying that major SPs should give all of their core backbone business to one vendor? Back in the day Avici was used by several carriers including AT&T (who also used Cisco, etc). If you are implying that Juniper, Cisco, and Avici make up "just about everybody", you are partially correct. It would appear that you need to add ALU to the list. It's not a very crowded list to begin with now is it.
Best regards..