Can a 7200 NPE 300 Router handle 10Mbit/s NAT

[mesuti]

Currently I have a Linux router which does NAT-ing of a traffic approximately 10Mbit/s properly, I wanted to replace it with a cisco router 7200 NPE 300 Router with 256 RAM, can it NAT that amount of traffic?

thank you.

[tbaranski]

Good question. An NPE 300 can do around 300-400Mbps of traffic without ACLs or other performance-reducing features configured. It's rated at 353,000pps using CEF and 20,000pps when process-switching, so even if NAT is process-switched the CEF/process-switching pps ratio would lead one to believe that around 20Mbps of throughput should be possible.

But this is a very simplistic way of ballparking performance and unfortunately there's no way to know for sure what throughput you'll get without running a test yourself (or finding someone else who has already done so).

[mesuti]

thanks for the reply,Can NAT be used with CEF, and does CEF substantially improve the performance?

So the Cisco 7200 NPE -300 should perform above 20 Mb if CEF is utilized?

Is this true?

thank you very much

[ruwhite · Accepted solution]

Yes, and yes. I don't know what the performance would be, exactly, because it does add cycles to the switching path.

:-)

Russ.W

[bujar]

What if you add ACLs, VoIP traffic, routing protocols, MPLS, MPLSVPN etc? How can you run test on the lab so it wouldn't effect the network?