Cisco announces 322Tbps router
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Cisco announces 322Tbps router
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Cisco announces 322Tbps router
#2Ok, so it may not "change the face of the internet". And maybe it disappointed investors a bit.
But 322 Tbps is really, really fast. Think of a typical divx movie at 700MB. This thing could route 60,000 movies per second. Go Cisco.
Re: Cisco announces 322Tbps router
#3What problems does this solve? Are internet core routers currently running near peak, or is this just getting ready for what traffic patterns will look like in 2 - 3 years? Will this lower transit costs? Will it lower costs for end-users?
All of the news coverage I've heard is that 'this thing makes the net faster', but no opinions from the people who will actually work with these things.
Re: Cisco announces 322Tbps router
#4The actual Cisco source... http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/prod_030910.html
As an aside, it bothers me that news sites like CNET (and others) don't actually link to a source. In this case, they had no issue using the image from the Cisco site, but couldn't be bothered to link to Cisco's actual news post. I digress, maybe I'm making something out of nothing.
Re: Cisco announces 322Tbps router
#5It's three times faster than the older CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004.
Woah. Seriously? And they're being congratulated for this? I mean, yeah, this thing is freakishly fast, but is that really all they've managed in 6 years? Moore must be laughing. That, or they're simply delaying things in getting to market to make money on easier tech than they're capable of (makes good business sense, so I wouldn't be surprised).
Re: Cisco announces 322Tbps router
#6The actual Cisco source... http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/prod_030910.html As an aside, it bothers me that news sites like CNET (and others) don't actually link to a source. In this case, they had no issue using the image from the Cisco site, but couldn't be bothered to link to Cisco's actual news post. I digress, maybe I'm making something out of nothing.
The difference between new-media and old media is that the new media is not afraid to link out to their sources. They know their readers are savvy enough to find their way back.
Re: Cisco announces 322Tbps router
#7It's three times faster than the older CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004. Woah. Seriously ? And they're being congratulated for this? I mean, yeah, this thing is freakishly fast, but is that really all they've managed in 6 years? Moore must be laughing. That, or they're simply delaying things in getting to market to make money on easier tech than they're capable of (makes good business sense, so I wouldn't be surpr…
Good point but we need to consider the change in price as well. If the 2004 model cost five times as much then they're still roughly in line with Moore's law.
Also there's the possibility that the bottlenecks in bandwidth have been on the fiber side rather than the routing side. (I'm really not sure of this - can anyone advise?)
Re: Cisco announces 322Tbps router
#8Sweet. When can I run this baby at home?
Re: Cisco announces 322Tbps router
#9What problems does this solve? Are internet core routers currently running near peak, or is this just getting ready for what traffic patterns will look like in 2 - 3 years? Will this lower transit costs? Will it lower costs for end-users? All of the news coverage I've heard is that 'this thing makes the net faster', but no opinions from the people who will actually work with these things.
I do actually work with devices like these. Not Cisco. Although I used to. But I work with equally monstrous packet movers from other vendors.
I glanced at the released documentation a little. The thing to remember is that this is a multi-cabinet router for _really_ big telcos. It scales up to 1152 slots. Since a single shelf system is 16 slots. 1152 slots is 72 shelfs. Judging from the picture a rack can hold 2 shelves. So that's 36 racks for one router to do 322tbps.
In the telco world it's all about density per-rack. Colo space is expensive and so is cooling and power. How much switching/routing capacity can you get in one rack? Well it looks like Cisco now has about 9tbps per-rack. Which is not bad but it puts things a bit more in perspective.
Cisco also tends to measure their bandwidth a bit differently than us mortals. They take full-duplex line-rate and double it. I've seen them do this on previous products so I'm only assuming they've done this here.
So what we really end up with is a router that does 4.5tbps full-duplex per-rack. Still not bad. But not as mind blowing a number as 322tbps. And not so far away from the competition either.
Re: Cisco announces 322Tbps router
#10It's three times faster than the older CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004. Woah. Seriously ? And they're being congratulated for this? I mean, yeah, this thing is freakishly fast, but is that really all they've managed in 6 years? Moore must be laughing. That, or they're simply delaying things in getting to market to make money on easier tech than they're capable of (makes good business sense, so I wouldn't be surpr…
Good point but we need to consider the change in price as well. If the 2004 model cost five times as much then they're still roughly in line with Moore's law. Also there's the possibility that the bottlenecks in bandwidth have been on the fiber side rather than the routing side. (I'm really not sure of this - can anyone advise?)
Fiber can currently carry wavelengths up to 10Gbps in a standardized way. Standards for 40Gbps and 100Gbps are currently being written (and have been implemented).
These wavelengths can then be multiplexed 8 at a time into carrier groups, which can then be multiplexed 8 at a time into WDM (Wavelength-Division Multiplexing). So one fiber can currently carry 640Gbps, and this will soon go up to 2560Gbps with 40Gbps and probably also 6400Gbps with 100Gbps. I believe that the multiplexing for WDM will be doubled soon, but I'm not sure whether this can carry 816100Gbps wavelengths.
Judging from the amount of ports you see in the picture, the router must do something like that.
Note that WDM switches that can branch out 10Gbps Ethernet will probably cost a fraction of the price of this router and are only about 20U in size.