

Cisco announces 322Tbps router - sean12345
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10466043-266.html

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dboyd
The 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.

~~~
po
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.

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storborg
Ok, 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.

~~~
tzury

      Think of a typical divx movie at 700MB. 
      This thing could route 60,000 movies per second. Go Cisco.
    

according to CISCO

    
    
      The Cisco CRS-3 triples the capacity of its predecessor, the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System.
      With up to 322 Terabits per second, which enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second.
      Every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously.
      And every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes.

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andrewvc
What 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.

~~~
smutticus
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.

~~~
Maven911
Yes you are right, they double the full-duplex bandwidth

[http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=188948&](http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=188948&);
With the upgrade, Cisco can run 140 Gbit/s per slot, with switching capacity
of 4.48 Tbit/s per chassis. (The latter figure is doubled to count ingoing and
outgoing traffic at the same time, as the industry tends to do.)

If you don't mind me asking what did you work on (juniper, ALU, etc.), and
what exactly was your role ?

I work in support for the mobile core router side where we use carrier-grade
routers but nothing as big as the big Internet core routers.

~~~
smutticus
Hey Maven,

I actually work for a competitor of Cisco but I used to work for Cisco. I
guess I'm more of a test engineer than anything else. But I also go to
customers and setup/troubleshoot our gear and other vendors. Sometimes I might
do a little bug fixing but mostly I'm working with customers trying to get
their networks to work.

I'm not comfortable posting my employer here but if you want to continue this
conversation go ahead and mail me at smutt AT depht D0T com.

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Groxx
_It'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).

~~~
philk
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?)

~~~
jvdh
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 8 _16_ 100Gbps 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.

------
patrickgzill
The reception on the NANOG list was "why is Cisco so proud to announce how
behind they are?" - apparently other competitors like Juniper have been
shipping similar functionality already.

And the 322Tbps routing functionality is really a cluster of many racks (about
70?) of equipment filled with line cards.

------
Kilimanjaro
Downloading movies in less than a minute and video phone calls.

The future is complete.

------
ww520
Sweet. When can I run this baby at home?

~~~
drtse4
Made me remember this: [http://jinternets.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/yo-mama-
got-jinte...](http://jinternets.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/yo-mama-got-
jinternets/)
[http://fibresystems.org/blog/2008/04/40g_connection_used_to_...](http://fibresystems.org/blog/2008/04/40g_connection_used_to_dry_lau.html)
An "experiment" done in 2007 by Peter Löthberg (to publicize DWDM technology
in sweden i guess) installing a crs-1 at his mother's house :)

