Is Hyperchip Hype?

Peter Galbraith writes "There was an interview on CBC (here in Canada) last evening about Hyperchip, a Montreal-based company that are working on a new type of router that would scale up 1000 times in traffic (so wouldn't be obsolete in less than a year) and would pass packets to their destination in a few hops instead of a dozen or more. Any experts out there think it's hype? Or real?" The explanation on Hyperchip's "technology" page is pretty thin, but considering they just raised $70 million, I hope they've given more convincing details to their investors.

Comments

Hyoerchip

[FigBug]

With a name like HyperChip its got to be a hoax. I it was real it would have a name like RXE-8635P

Re:Hyoerchip

[__aaaaxm1522]

Don't judge it by it's name alone. French Canadian companies often choose interesting names. For example: OEone (based in Hull, Quebec... makers of a Linux based internet appliance that was reviewed on Slashdot awhile ago)... and can't forget Newlix - well, maybe you can. They went under last year, but were making a linux distro targetted towards small and medium sized businesses (Firewall, email, filesharing, etc).

Step One:

[Saint Aardvark]

Step One: Tell everyone you have an amazing new router.
Step Two:
Step Three: Profits!

Re:Step One:

[ekrout]

Step Two: Sign-up for a user account at the ultimate geek site and post a story about Step One.

;-)

Re:Step One:

[drsoran]

Step Two: Manufacture and market amazing new router.

That wasn't that hard now was it?

Re:Step One:

[Saint Aardvark]

I'm afraid ekrout knows too much. He has become...expendable.

Get him, my robots!

Re:Step One:

[Jose]

uhhh...it was done on Kids in the Hall way before it was done on South Park..may have been done before Kids as well...

Tang.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no. They should have tacked on some more names.

Hyper
Compu
Global
Ultra
Turbo
2002

Now all it needs is some sort of advertising-catchy slogan-type thing.

IBM Guy: Let the UltraGlobalDominatorChip2002 Allow your business to stomp down on the little guy.
Duffman: Oh yeah!

Funny Coincidence

[Zenithal]

I'm here in Montreal, and I applied to go work for them not even a week ago.

I was inadequate :)

If they can figure that out, they probably have a chance.

Re:Funny Coincidence

[Zero__Kelvin]

"I'm here in Montreal, and I applied to go work for them not even a week ago."

"I was inadequate :)"

"If they can figure that out, they probably have a chance."

Are you telling us that your girlfriend may successfully develop a new technology, or that the companies board of directors should call you for a good time???

8^}

Cheers and minor jeers!


Zero__Kelvin

Those were the days...

[Gerald]

"With the conservative estimates of the Internet usage doubling every six months, the need for bandwidth at the core of the Internet is outpacing the ability of the conventional router technology to keep up."

Am I the only one, or did this make anyone else nostalgic for the mid-90s?

Re:Those were the days...

[Raindeer]

Maybe you should look at the statistics of the Londen Internet Exchange. They still seem to exhibit growth :-) FYI LINX is the larges Internet Exchange Point of Europe and carries more then 13Gb per second on a daily basis at the moment. This was 4Gbit at the start of the year. You can find their traffic stats here

Hyperchip

[yoink!]

I was at a Pub one evening (I live in Montreal) and I happened to meet their sales manager... ms. Jen Goldfinch. Although I had seen the Hyperchip building on many occasions, I had never inquired as to what they do. After meeting this woman, I was given the impression that their routers are actually in use by some of the big players in the digital pipelines game. She was actually pretty clear on that, although I can't seem to find any exact information concerning their customers on their website. Perhaps some questions to nortel, and qwest folks might clear this up. The only thing that make me dubious about her claim of widespread adoption, would be that if their products are so much "better" (for the lack of a better word) than the competitions, then why is abilene using cisco products? Unfortunately I don't have that kind of time on my hands.

Re:Hyperchip

[bokmann]

A Sales Manager told that to you in a bar??? Well then it's GOT to be true.

After all, I've never known sales people OR barflys to exaggerate at all.

Re:Hyperchip

[Raindeer]

The only thing that make me dubious about her claim of widespread adoption, would be that if their products are so much "better" (for the lack of a better word) than the competitions, then why is abilene [internet2.edu] using cisco products? Unfortunately I don't have that kind of time on my hands.

The reason for this is that Cisco has long-standing excellent relations with the academic community, even though sometimes their technology is crap. (Cisco 12000 with 3 (or was it 4) GigE ports come to mind) These relationships, together with the sheer mass and therefore possibilities to finance research is the reason they own the Research and Education market and a more technologically sound company like Juniper doesn't.

Re:Hyperchip

[renehollan]

Disclaimer: I work for Chiaro, a potential competitor of Hyperchip.

I recently heard from a public source that they raised $40 million (prolly US$, given the $70 million figure quoted - prolly C$), with $30 coming from government loan guarantees.

Many next-generation router companies have fallen on hard times, with some closing up shop, in this tech-recession. Hyperchip and Chiaro are the few still standing.

Obviously, I'd like to say more, but since I work for a potential competitor, I can not.

industry comparison

[jaavaaguru]

It looks a bit like the PC processor industry - they're pushing the technology to its limits just so that they can claim they're the fastest. What happens when the bandwidth requirements have also scaled 1000 times? There are no overclocking options here folks! On a lighter side - If I had one of thouse routers I might be able to load all those images and flash a bit faster :-)

Hopcount != Speed

[cwsnate]

Simple hop count does translate directly into speed. A two hop route plagued with slow nodes might be (and often is) slower than a route that consists of more hops with faster nodes. Sounds like ignorant marketing hype.

Other vendors that come close?

[scubacuda]

Cisco and Juniper can only (currently) route in gigabit speeds.

Other competitors that they will have to deal with: Pluris, IronBridge Networks and Charlotte's Web Networks .

Re:Other vendors that come close?

[chill]

Lucent already has several Wavestar 400G/800G units deployed (400 Gbit/800 Gbit) as well as a few Lambda Routers (all optical) capable of 1.6 Tb routing.

In the field, running. Their Optical Network Group training facility is in Orlando, FL and I have gotten to play with some of these units. Very nice.

Use Existing Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Cisco has had the technology to do their so called 'smart routing' for years. It's called BGP. I have seen it intelligently route packets across the country that only goes across 2, maybe 3 routers. It seems in this "dot-com" era of techies, no one has a clue about routing. There are so very few people who know what to do with a router, and obviously those people aren't working for any commercial ISPs. I used to work networking for the government, and one of our customers had a problem with routing through UUnet. I contacted their router dept and talked to one of their so-called "router engineers" and had to explain to him how to fix an assymetrical route.

Do a traceroute to yahoo.com. Conceivably, you shouldn't have to go more than 5 hops. But with every major corporation creating a string of routers rather than a mesh.... it takes for ever to get there.

Re:Use Existing Technology

[Bookwyrm]

That is because there are people out there who believe that the network should be 'dumb' with all the intelligence in the edges. This class of people rarely understand that the network needs intelligence to do its job well.

Re:Use Existing Technology

[Dave Goldblatt]

Why do you care what the number of hops is? When you can do line-rate forwarding of packets (as most modern switch/routers can), it's irrelevant. Just because your traceroute shows "2, maybe 3 routers" doesn't mean that's all it's traversing (could be going through a LSP); in fact, I'll put money that you can't show me a trace across the country between two endstations that doesn't go over at least 4-6 routers.

BGP is not a Cisco protocol, it's an IETF draft standard (see RFC 1771); every router worth its salt for the last 7-10 years has supported it.

Also, asymmetrical routes are not necessarily bad; there's load-balancing, administrative weighting...

Re:Use Existing Technology

[juuri]

Open foot, insert mouth.

CISCO actually preaches in their advanced networking design (one of the things needed to get a CCIE) that all intelligence should be moved outside the core. The core exists only to switch they scream time and time again. They are right.

Examing packets is damn expensive, you don't want that in your core layer at all. You want it moved out as far as possible to move the possible bottleneck as far towards the end user as possible. A well designed network does its job well without having any fricken idea whats going on other at any high levels.

Conversely the upside of this belief for vendors is it helps to sell more equipment since you need more layers to properly shield the core from having to examing the packets.

Re:Use Existing Technology

[Phasedshift]

Couple of things...

1. 90% of the time when you call a large internet service provider, you speak to their frontline support, who address their level 2 support (etc) as 'routing engineers', consider how many people must call them and complain about problems (90% of which are probably caused by stupid things like them advertising a /24 in class B space, without advertising the /16 also, so the route gets nuked at a border router, as quite a few providers filter based on classfull boundries, or people just not understanding how a traceroute even works, and demanding to speak to a 'routing guru' because their traceroute dies after a certain point due to an ACL (access control list), so they naturally think the web server/mail server, etc they are going too is down, even though it is not.).

2. As someone pointed out, number of hops != latency, etc. Most people who are just starting their quest for knowledge in this field tend to confuse the two unfortunately.

Now, while in an ideal network, 99% of things will be done at layer 2, thereby making the total hopcount in your traceroute lower (if your traffic is going through an ATM switch who doesn't know about/care about layer 3 information in an ATM cell, it will obviously not show up as a hop in your trace). The hopcount your traceroute shows doesn't matter, the simple fact that all that has to be done is the header of the ATM cell (the first 5 bytes) is read, and then the cell is forwarded to its proper destination (similar for ethernet, using cut-through switching, etc) doing switching at layer 2, vs. having to read the IP packet's headers to find the destination will provide a noticible decrease in latency in most situations.

You are however correct in that Cisco has many features out there that will greatly increase performance for people. Mind you, there aren't any official 3rd party benchmarks against this (the company the article is referring too) company's products, so we don't know if they are something to laugh at, or really are better then whats out there currently (although I am voting for the laughing part).

Also, in regards to BGP, (heh btw it has quite a bit of overhead, since it uses TCP), while it is pretty much the only good choice for an EGP (external gateway protocol), you will still need an IGP such as OSPF, etc unless you intend to have your router(s) have BGP sessions with the IP's of other routers known via directly connected (or static routes), which would be stupid (except for some situations using static routes in a very small network). Its not like you setup a BGP session with another router, and it 'magically' works, there is quite a bit of traffic engineering involved (how much is dependent on how big your network is), and cooperation among internet service providers (i.e. to set the localpref that is distributed to your IBGP mesh based on certain communities received from a peer, or the other way around, so people can control the path traffic goes back into their network in a better way then padding the route (i.e. adding more AS's to the AS_PATH which chances are wont give you the desired results), or other methods).

Re:Use Existing Technology

[Nethead]

BGP isn't really that smart. That's why I make good bucks making it look smart (traffic/load balancing). Asymetric routes aren't a problem really, I don't know why you'd worry about them. The internet and BGP was designed to do that. And I'll take one of UU's "so called" router engineers any day over a government hack.. I'm sure _you_ didn't talk to a real NOC person. And about your string vs mesh fetish: I guess you don't really understand how real world economics plays a part in network design. A non-congested router doesn't add more that 2ms to the path. You're like the guy that wants a non-stop freeway from your house to every desination in the world. Sorry , it ain't goint to happen. If you think that you have a better way to run the net, come to a NANOG meeting and give your ideas a try.

Re:Use Existing Technology

[Bookwyrm]

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Building it is one thing. Making it run efficiently is something else altogether. Perhaps that takes a class of people even smarter than the builders?

That is what I was referring to in my comment in a sense. Anyone can build chaos, diversity -- a jungle. Anyone can say "We will make the edges smart and the core dumb!", but the doing is another matter. Such a construction is not efficient, though. History tends to indicate that farming has won out over jungles, that civilization over barbarians, corporations over small buisinesses.

As the demands placed on the network become more stringent in terms of QoS, costs, efficiency -- once the network becomes no longer cutting edge, but boring old infrastructure, it will become ordered and managed to increase efficiency at the cost of diversity. Every frontier is eventually settled because it uses resources more efficiently that way.

Pretending that the core network does not need intelligence allows people to pretend that they can do whatever they want, drop whatever packets they want into the system, and have it work. (In the slightly higher application level, people learned that they could send SPAM to everyone else easily.) The issue is that this is slowly creating an hostile relationship with the core network. Issues with having ports blocked to prevent people from running servers on their connections are symptomatic of this -- the edge and the core are conflicting over what is allowed. (Hint: the core wins unless the edge pays at least the cost of the actual bandwidth used. The core can always cut the connection. If the edges do not cover the costs of the bandwidth, the core goes out of business, and everyone loses (you know, like all those DSL providers...))

Barbarians who have stood at the edges and shouted and screamed that they do not need civilization have always been pushed back by the expansion of civilization. The edges will have to be come civilized and deal with the core network in a civilized fashion, not just run rampant through it -- the core is alread setting up walls and gates on the edges to stop the barbarians: filtering out spoofed source addresses, NAT, firewalls, port blocking, monitors, sniffers, etc. Because the core network is denied any useful information/intelligence about services to make optimizations, because it has to handle *anything*, which is inefficient/expensive, the core network is , unsurprizingly, becoming dumb -- and, surprise, dumb things do not do well in performing a variety of services efficiently, the services and traffic have to be simple and uniform to be handled efficiently by a dumb box. So, the traffic and services are *made* simple -- no web servers for you, bud! We'll forcibly shape your traffic patterns until they are more simple and efficient for us, 'cause we're only a bunch of dumb core guys, right? We can't do anything complex! Why, yes, tech support really is staffed by low-grade morons -- the network is pretty dumb and simple, you know, doesn't take any brains to run!

Ultimately, the barbarians will have to become civilized, the only question is on whose terms, or find a new frontier. If the barbarians are going to want good terms, they are going to have to treat the core with respect -- they will have to have intelligence in the core to communicate with it. For QoS, etc., the edges will have to be able to tell the core what they want, and the core will have to have the intelligence to see if it can manage it, and arrange for the service. And the barbarians better negotiate while they still have power -- if they all get crowded into little reservations of network places with unfiltered services and become a tiny part of the market first without any bargaining power, well...

If the only communication/negotiation between the edge to the core is "Route packet! Route packet! Route packet!" The only reponse the core can have is "Yes" or "No". Allowing for more intelligent negotiation of service allows for compromises and more flexibility. The core can *always* say no.

Murphy's Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules.

Possession is 9/10ths of the law.

As long as we need core networks, routers, interconnect points, etc. those who own them will ultimately have the power to make the rules. And they aren't owned by the IETF, and they aren't owned by the edges.

Could be...

[Atomic Frog]

We had a project that was probably similar in concept, maybe slightly lower throughput. I don't think the claims are that far fetched.

However, getting one chip working is one thing. Getting an entire box is a whole 'nother trick entirely, as I'm sure they will discover.

They are, obviously short on technical details, but I find no particular reason to disbelieve them. There are a lot of "real" tech companies in Montreal (my ex-company had a branch there), and fewer fakes than other places.

$70million won't last you very long without any other source of revenue. If they are lucky and really, really good, they may have a product out in production in 2-3 years.

The terabit market flopped, so go faster!

[Dave Goldblatt]

This is a company on its fourth round of financing ($220M CDN invested to date), with no announced customers - or even beta trials.. and they've been around since 1997?

Another thing is that article is misleading; they really received $12M in funding, and added another $31M in repayable loans from the Canadian government. Again, the numbers quoted in the article are Canadian dollars, not US.

Several terabit router companies have failed (such as Ironbridge ) and others are having problems, a la Avici along with Nexabit.

For more entertainment, read the article and comments in Light Reading.

It's not the bandwidth, it's the services. Besides, who can afford to provision 65,000 OC-192s?

Re:The terabit market flopped, so go faster!

[dprice]

It's not the bandwidth, it's the services. Besides, who can afford to provision 65,000 OC-192s?

Of course 65,000 OC-192's is an architectural scalability limit. It makes great marketing material.

The terabit router market reminds me of the supercomputer market in the late 1980's. There were a bunch of startups working with bleeding-edge technology to make the fastest machines for a handful of customers who could afford it. Many of the startups died as the actual machines came to market. There were only so many customers that could afford and would use such machines at that time.

One of the main things that differentiated the supercomputer survivors from the casualties was the ability to provide a total hardware, software, and support solution to the customers. For the terabit router market, look for the companies delivering the full solution to the customers. Like you said, it's the services. From what I know of Hyperchip, they started with a chip idea for a scalable fabric, and until recently they didn't have much software and services capability.

Also watch for the companies with the least hype. It seems that many of the terabit router companies that have died or are dying have been full of promises that they couldn't deliver. Caspian was one of those hyped companies, and they aren't doing well recently. The smart companies will keep quiet until they have something real, so the company that delivers the best terabit router might be one most people have not heard of.

The LightReading link that you gave is a good place to check out what people in the optical networking industry have to say. The noise level can be high on the message boards (not unlike Slashdot), but there are some individuals that have great insight into the terabit router market. One such inidividual goes by the message board name of "skeptic".

Re:The terabit market flopped, so go faster!

[chill]

Just FYI: Nexabit was purchased by Lucent. Their technology is being incorporated in Lucent's new TMX-880 MPLS switch.

Re:The terabit market flopped, so go faster!

[SuiteSisterMary]

Maybe the Top Secret REAL Business Plan(tm) says "Be aquired by Cisco."

patents

[Syre]

they claim to have 41 patents issued... I found 3:


I/O and memory bus system for DFPS and units with two or multi-dimensional programmable cell architectures

Efficient direct replacement cell fault tolerant architecture

Fault tolerant data processing system fabricated on a monolithic substrate

From these it appears they are fabricating wafers with lots of semi-independent processing nodes, which are tolerant of failures of some of the nodes (and can therefore take into account chip production glitches on part of the wafer).

This could give them a potentially large performance advantage, if they can do it right.

Re:patents

[dadragon]

It could be that they have 41 patents in Canada. The USPTO is not the only patent office in the world.

More info

[Alien54]

There is Investor analysis here, with a power point presentation

They also have an EETimes story Archived and there is this news item from before the dot-com boom went bust.

Other items include this bit saying we don't need petabit routing anyhow (just wait a few years!). I also spotted this job description from some namesless company.

System Engineering Manager As the System Engineering Manager, you will be responsible for the Petabit/Terabit router prototype system development using the state of the art switch fabrics. You will lead the system design team to perform OC-768, OC-192, OC-48 linecard design, and multi-Terabit switch plane design. Requirements include a BSEE plus 7 years chip design experience or MSEE plus 5 years design experience in router system and high speed board design. Networking and Gigabit line card experience is preferred.

Basically, this job description says to me, "You will invent the products we need so that we can make lots of bucks off your brains". One of those things, go in with eyes open.

Same thing, other side of the border

[nsample]

The same thing is happening on this side of the border. LaurelNetworks is another super-startup company, with a lot of capital, with their guns aimed at the "big boys" of network hardware (Cisco, Juniper, etc.). I did some work with Laurel, and even some work with a micro-startup networking company, BlueWave Networks.

I don't think that there's any hoaxing at all going on here. They're legitimate players with some heavy capital backing them. They also have great engineers and some good technology. It may not be enough, however. What it's going to come down to (IMHO) is the willingness of big ISPs and carriers to adopt technology from a new vendor.

Cisco may not have the best equipment, but everyone and their dog worth their salt in this game knows IOS and how to admin it. You can't say the same of any of the new vendor's products.

We've moved beyond the days of "great ideas" and "great products." Internet routing is a mature market in which the biggest obstacle is now overcome the inertia of the entrenched players.

The anology reminds me of Linux vs. MS, but then again, what doesn't? :)

Re:Same thing, other side of the border

[Jobe_br]

And support. I've personally experienced and heard from others that Cisco's technical support is amazing, bar none. Being transferred around the globe to catch people 'awake' in the proper timezones is a measure of how seriously Cisco take support. I've never worked with other vendor's routers, but ISP's familiarity and appreciation of Cisco's support system will be difficult to overcome.

Re:Same thing, other side of the border

[Cato]

Quite a few vendors are emulating the Cisco IOS command line interface on completely new hardware - e.g. Unisphere and Foundry in the US, and Huawei in China (who produce Cisco clones at 10% of Cisco prices...) Emulating the CLI can be done on any size of router, of course.

Destination-based Wavelengths

[vtechpilot]

From Thier site:

Accelerating the war are the recent advances in ultra-long-haul optics and optical switches, which are making it practical for routers to place packets on destination-based wavelengths that can take them as close as possible to their final destination in the core, thus eliminating intermediate routing hops and unnecessary O-E-O conversions.

I read this as meaning that you have a strand of fiber that runs from say for example Boston, to NY to Washington to Richmond to Charlotte to Atlanta to .... and that a packet originates in Boston and is transmitted in red light to the next node, if the light isn't the color for that node, So if red was Richmond, NY and Washington would reflect the red light down the line until it gets to Richmond. This way NY and WAS don't have to convert the signal which saves a lot of time and work. Also this allows Boston to talk to Richmond as 1 hop as far as the software is concerned. Similarly a packet transmitted in Amber light might go all the way to Atlanta before being converted to Electrons.

Sounds like a good idea to me since it should work on existing fiber. The real question is how hard and expensive is it to start with two nodes and grow from there.

Lightreading.com article

[scubacuda]

Lightreading's article, Hyperchip Hypes Its Hardware, claims that Hyperchip stands out in 2 ways:

1) "It's aiming to create something much more than a bigger, faster, box. It's aiming to create the Internet equivalent of a Class 5 telephone switch, something that would sit at the edge of optical backbones and handle IP connections to tens of thousands of users. Hyperchip's developments would potentially replace entire ISP POPs (points of presence) and would have an aggregate capacity measured in - get this - petabits a second."

2) "Hyperchip is addressing this requirement in a totally different (some would say bizarre) way. It's devoted most of its efforts into adapting supercomputer hardware to deliver the scalability it requires. Software - considered the key to success by most terabit router vendors and users - seems to be of secondary importance to the Montreal based startup."

The article says that trials will start at the end of the year. That should prove interesting...

Moore's Law

[Apreche]

Look at the graph on the company's white papers. Optical vs. Moore's law. First of all you really can't compare a law and optical. Second of all, they have moores law wrong.

Hyperchip's name

[mountainman]

I used to work for Hyperchip. I don't believe I'm violating my confidentiality agreement by revealing that the name the founder Richard Norman originally wanted was "HyperCorp" but www.hypercorp.com was taken so he settled for Hyperchip instead. The company was founded on the strength of Richard's patents in wafer scale integration and the original business plan included a lot of stuff that was accurately described by the term "hyperchip".

It's the expandability of their backplane....

[addikt10]

That makes their product different. With Cisco gear, you have a very, very small number of high speed ports available to you in one chassis (and several of these "capabilities" are eaten up when you go with redundant solutions).

The idea behind Hyperchip, that is a supposedly better implementation than Avichi's that preceeded it, is to have a packet switching backplane that is expandable to multiple bays, as opposed to the tiny boxes such as the cisco 12000. Since it is a common backplane, there are fewer "hops".

The real limit is power. The Avici systems used over 400 amps of three phase power per bay, and (I believe) scaled to 16 bays, each one capable of running over 60 OC-192s at line speed.

Hyperchip's unit looks better.

Right now, their just trying to figure out how to market it, and how they can add services inside the box that you wouldn't get otherwise. Think of all the stuff you would like to do to streams of that size, but just can't. Also, think of what to do with packets that are going to full pipes. At OC-192 speeds, you can't hold on to packets. There isn't enough time to put it in to memory.

PS OC-192 can carry approximately 10 Gb/s. Or, over 1.2GB/s (this isn't ethernet, it's sonet) (but will have 10 Gb ethernet interfaces, but they just can't carry as much)

At 10 Gb/s, a 1600 byte packet (for those ethernet fans out there) is on the wire (going across a fixed point)for 160 nanoseconds.

Re:Hyperchip Technology FAQ

[perky]

IBM think so

It's a circuit switch, not a packet router

[Animats]

This is another one of those circuit switches for "flows", front-ended by a route tagger. Flows are switched at rates far lower than the packet rate. Think of this as a patchboard for the fast optical pipes in the backbone. You could have fixed patching, but as traffic patterns change through the day, devoting extra bandwidth to some routes can be useful.

The last time this came around on Slashdot, the switch was built out of little micromachined moving mirrors, like the TI video projector.

Hyperchip has not made the big breakthrough to true optical packet switching, and they admit this in their "white paper". That's considered the next big goal in routing. Hyperchip's technology is an interim measure only.

Hyperchip

[Izmunuti]

They just closed their fourth round of funding. Note this was 70 million Canadian dollars, US$43 million. Only US$12 million was from venture capitalists, the remaining US$31 million was essentially a loan from the government of Quebec.

These guys have made some pretty wild claims in the past. Their first product was (maybe still is) to be called the PBR 1280. PBR = PetaBitRouter. They claim it scales to ~65000 OC192 ports. That's pretty freaking huge.

We'll see. They claim they're relasing a product later this year.

Words from someone who knows...

[routerwhore]

Alright, you guys are killing me. No one seems to have a clue about the router industry but seems happy to make moronic comments anyway. I work for a router vendor, and have seen Hyperchip's product also. It is the same as most every next gen product from all of the router vendors.

Multishelf is the new design. Juniper's next gen product, Gibson is multishelf. Alcatel's (not that anyone gives a shit about their IP products) next gen product, the 777, is multishelf. Cisco's and any other core router vendor that still has money is are also building multishelf systems.

The Hyperchip gear is not revelutionary, it simply can control a lot of shelves and ports from a single vantage port. This doesn't mean that single pipes are going to be running at millions of megabits, it means that you can switch large amounts of traffic across your backplane. This isn't a big deal, its just more then anyone needs right now. The rest of the companies will come out with products that can be daisy chained all day long also, but are busy making in between type products to generate revenue in the mean time.

This also has nothing to do with DWDM, because again, we aren't talking about bigger pipes. Just bigger boxes to plug more pipes into. The current pipes are OC192/10Gig-E. They are essentially the same thing and work just fine on networks today. The next step is OC768/40Gig. Currently most core routers are being made with 10 Gb/s slots. The next gen of routers will be made with 40 Gb/s slots. This is the landscape for the next 3 years. This is also perfectly natural and makes sense to anyone that has a clue. Now the statement that its 1000 times "faster" is just marketing and hype. But people that actually buy boxes like this don't give a shit about hype. They put boxes in their labs, test the hell out of them, and if they like them, they will by 100 million dollars worth of them. Simple as that. Let the ignorance continue punks.

Lucent used to have a router that sounds like this

[thogard]

But the never found any customers. It turns out that the few people that need very high speed routing don't buy anything but cisco and in that market it won't matter if you have a product thats much better, you'll have poor sales for years before the market will even consider your product.

As far as routing much faster, its not that hard to do. If you stop treating a router as a router and more like a switch, you can speed things up a grat deal with content addressable memory (the stuff used for cache tags). Its very expensive but 8 mb of CAM ram will let you decide which of 16 interfaces a packet goes to within 500 ps after the address bits hit the hardware. You can't do real time route update on this type of system like a cisco but you can still change routes within miliseconds.

The ideas behind the internet are dead when a small business can't dual home. Without routable class C address, that has already happened.

Check out Terabitcorp

[Broadcatch]

At TerabitCorp, Alan Huang employed what he calls a Galois Network using many standard off-the-shelf routers to create a fault-tolerant, open platform terabit meta-router with some very cool properties. Not sure if the idea ever flew, though...

Re:Cheer up

[Alsee]

What cretin modded that OFFTOPIC?!?

I'm sorry, but in *my* universe, redheads are never off topic :)

Anyone of the same oppinion might want to check here.

P.S.
No, parent comment wasn't from me. I wouldn't have bothered going Anonymous.

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Flash

[Alsee]

Akkkk!

I wanted to get some details on the tech, so I clicked the link to their website and got bombarded by a Flash.

Ok, am I a freak because that website make be want to severly hurt somebody (the inventor of Flash comes to mind), or are the freaks the suits who go to the web site and are impressed by the Flash?

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Pent-up Demand?

[evilviper]

I guess with the stock-market crash and the effect of the Sept 11th attacks, there must have been quite a bit of pent-up demand for snake-oil stocks.

Avici Terabit Routers

[billstewart]

AT&T's network has been using the Avici TSR routers to handle their OC192 trunks.

"Terabit", when describing routers, currently refers to the total capacity of the box, not to actually having terabit connections :-) OC192 is 10 Gbits, and is starting to become a mature technology. OC768 is 40 Gbits; I'm not sure if anybody's routing at that speed yet (probably), but it's not close enough to mature to be practical for anything more than the marketing value of *your* network having the biggest fastest pipe in existence, even if it's only going from San Francisco to San Jose.

Before the market crashed....

[billstewart]

Before the Justice Department Anti-Trust goons beat up Microsoft, Alan Greenspan raised interest rates a lot because the economy was "overheated", and the market crashed, there were really three business plans out there

• Go public and become Mozillionaires
  
• Sell out to Microsoft if you make software or web services
  
• Sell out to Cisco if you make hardware

Going public was fun if you could get investors to go for it (and if you could keep the stock price high until your six-months-can't-sell window was over). Selling out to MS (popularized by Hotmail's $400M or so deal) stopped being fun when the DoJ was threatening to rip MS apart into three companies, none of which were sure they'd want to buy you, so lots of small companies went bust. Selling out to Cisco still looked like fun, because Cisco shares were like cash, only better. Sigh.... the still-mostly-good-old-days.