[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&; 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.