Cisco announces 322Tbps router | Hacker News Reader

Cisco announces 322Tbps router

news.cnet.com

38 pointssean1234518 comments

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.

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.

They used an image provided specifically for the media to use? And they didn't even link back to the press release? That's pretty much how the relationship between the press and the PR-departments of companies work. I'd wager that it's a minority that wants access to source and can't google it for themselves.

They likely received the PR and image directly from Cisco, I doubt any of them visited that link.

We get press releases like that all the time.

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.

  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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

Well, it says it "starts" at $90k, and there's enough vagueness in the article to allow for multiple products based on a new framework allowing up to 322Tbps. If you've got a link to actual pricing & options, I'd be interested.

However, if that's the price for that speed, you make a good point. $90k is practically downright cheap for that kind of throughput.

edit: just saw the source article. Definitely implies scaling options with 322Tbps for the top and $90k for the bottom, and smutticus' comment backs this up. I didn't see any stated prices, though, so we're back to W.W.M.D?

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.

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

The future is complete.

Sweet. When can I run this baby at home?

Made me remember this: http://jinternets.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/yo-mama-got-jinte... http://fibresystems.org/blog/2008/04/40g_connection_used_to_... 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 :)

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