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Cisco Introduces a 322 Tbit/sec. Router
CWmike writes "Today Cisco Systems introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform. 'The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate,' Cisco's John Chambers said while announcing the product. At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, introduced in 2004. It also has more than 12 times the capacity of its nearest competitor, Chambers said. The CRS-3 will help the Internet evolve from a messaging to an entertainment and media platform, with video emerging as the 'killer app,' Chambers said. Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. (Or you could pump nearly one Library of Congress per second through the device, or give everyone in San Fransisco a 1Gbps internet connection.) AT&T said it has been using the CRS-3 to test 100Gbit/sec. data links in tests on a commercial fiber route in Florida and Louisiana."
Kidding, but you know someone is going to seriously ask that sometime today.
The new standard in router benchmarks for the 21st century!
If the first poster doesn't have a comment like "Yeah I'm using one of them right now, my internet is blazingly fast", it's a wasted opportunity.
Perhaps "Libraries of Congress"?
MSRP starts at $90,000. source
For example, is Library of Congress prime?
networking a Beowulf cluster with these?
ought to be enough for everyone.
I'd make a joke about how the internet can now handle the flow of porn through it, but I'm sure that with one of these routers, I've already been beaten to the punch!
Between terrible last mile infrastructure and ISP throttling I can't help but sarcastically comment big freaking deal.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
But Can it Run Crysis?!
I can watch TV... On the Internet!
John Chambers: Man of Vision!
Deleted
CIA/NSA software loaded to do deep packet inspection?
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Ars had a story yesterday about Cisco: Cisco: Internet to change forever Tuesday (place your bets!)
Is this the thing that will change the internet??
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I suggest we call it.... hmmm, commercial broadcast television, with the emphasis on "Commercial(s)", or maybe Cablevision!
With MOAR, well, everything!
In all seriousness, isn't the library of congress always growing? Is its growth rate significant enough that it's a very different size than it was in, say, the 1980s when we heard about hard disks that may someday be able to store an entire library of congress?
Until you put anything processor intensive on. You'd probably get no where near that.
Ok, 322Tbit/sec is cool and all, but where is the geek porn of it? Images, technical details and specifications? Otherwise it is vaporware to me.
What kind of wire would this router need? Is a single fibre cable enough for this kind of bandwidth? What is the limit of a fibre cable?
This is getting pretty close to gaming router territory.
Me thinks a linksys re-branding could be in the CRS-3's future.
So, I've been waiting for something better than 150 kB/s service for years, despite the promises by AT&T and Verizon that they're "rolling out" fiber to the home. Not my home.
When can I finally stream in real time at least one channel of video content that's not so compressed that it's unwatchable? At a subscription rate of under $40/month? When that happens, I'll be impressed.
However, I'm fearing that USians have been living under monopoly conditions of artificial bandwidth scarcity for so long that we're going to let the AT&Ts and Verizons charge us an arm and a leg for this kind of service in the near term.
I can see the fnords!
These things will likely put at risk ISP's who chose to continue throttling, as their competitors could install one or two and they would likely be out of business within a year given the capacity to add featured content for well targeted markets.
What the Linux community need to do is begin thinking about how they can invest in a few themselves and then offer nearly "free" distribution of content by the larger creative community. This would put tremendous pressure on cable operators everywhere by giving the public an alternative mechanism for receiving their programming, internet, phone, etc.
Installation of say about 10,000 - 20,0000 of these could permit phone services to project holograms of the person you are talking to over the phone, not just video. The bad news, is of course, the number of phone-sex providers and their commercials who jump dramatically.
to fap furiously. Do want.
"At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004."
That was six years ago and we're only tripling the speed? Is it cheaper? Smaller?
Moore's law (which doesn't work in every way, but it certainly works for the computing processors in this thing) would suggest that this thing has a lot more CPU power than the CRS-1. (In six years we'd expect somewhere between 8 and 32 times the oomph.) And yet they only encumbered it with three times the bandwidth.
I'm worried that a lot more processor power is going into filtering. Cisco is one of the big anti-network neutrality advocates. They want to sell the machines to impose the rules.
If this machine isn't lower power or smaller or cheaper or just built incompetently, then the real story here isn't it's bandwidth -- it's its power for adjusting traffic for increased profits.
I'm sorry but my CRS-3 (can't remember shit) Syndrome is running quite fast today. It's currently deleting the question before you even ask it and creating a space/time continium loop meaning we'll have to repeat this day forever
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Imagine how much traffic could be routed to collection clusters on behalf of your favourite three letter agency.
Like all Cisco high-end routers, it runs QNX Neutrino. The version used in these routers has a 12KB (not MB) microkernel. Almost all the packet handling is in FPGAs, but the supervision, error handling, etc. are in Cisco applications running on QNX Neutrino.
Imagine running a Beowulf cluster of these... each one running Linux!
...Wait, does it run Linux?
In Japan, it's pretty easy even in rural areas like Kyoto to order a 100Mb connection and get it at a reasonable rate.
In the States, we're playing on DSL lines that have 2Mb down, when they train up right (which they only do maybe 50% of the time) and other people are using Cable (Charter, Comlast, etc) and maybe that is 5 or maybe 10Mb down. If you are very lucky (and have the coin) maybe you are on AT&T uVerse or Verizon FIOS, and they could give you 100Mb, but you'd pay through the nose for it, and it would be asymmetrical. Most likely (the UVerse people I know) you are getting 10 down.
Now here comes Johnny Chambers saying this beast in the core could give GIG (1000Mb/s) to every person in San Francisco. Johnny's comb over is going to his brain. Just because a TR2N sized CRS-2 with enough horsepower to make the TRON MCP break down and cry comes into the provider core doesn't mean SHIT to you, the end user. Here in the states we won't see Japanese style connectivity for another 10 years. We're being left in the fucking stone age, because they money isn't there to build out past the core.
It pisses me off when Johnny tries to hype and pimp that stock price up, and they use multi-threading and distributed fabrics to get that speed, but we all know it's moving at snail's pace, the industry is consolidating, and unless you live where fiber is, forget it. And save me the "USA is so much bigger than Japan" argument, too. We don't see these speeds in our major cities, like NYC or Atlanta, SF or Chicago. Nothing even close. the SONET rings in these cities are still selling OC multiples at insane prices. It's still fucking 1996 in America.
Coupled with OLPM, imagine all the porn-starved nations this technology could feed.
Near enough to NONE of us will care about this, in the same way that we don't (really) care where our local ISP buys their power from.
Yeah it says Cisco+Internet+Faster in the same breath but
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Someone's gunna hafta put some loops in that horse to slow her down!
--
yeehaw
And though its called a law, It's NOT & increased processing power does not equate to throughput. GEEZ!
Cisco built a bigger, faster router.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. Move along. Just Cisco marketing engaging their HYPErdrive by claiming to "...change the Internet forever..." and other HYPErbolic phraseology.
Please...
Like all Cisco high-end routers, it runs QNX Neutrino. The version used in these routers has a 12KB (not MB) microkernel.
Almost all the packet handling is in FPGAs, but the supervision, error handling, etc. are in Cisco applications running on QNX Neutrino.
I thought newer releases of IOS were based on FreeBSD.
Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. (Or you could pump nearly one Library of Congress per second through the device, or give everyone in San Fransisco a 1Gbps internet connection.)
Or, could exceed their monthly bandwidth "cap" in 155 microseconds. So, what good is it?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What is the measure "one Library of Congress"?
I wonder how long it will take to start seeing some $900 Sisqqo knock offs?
$90,000 ~= $90 within two years. The usual pr0n and torrent jibes aside, this is a really cool development. The spec of the routers you run on your local/company networks (and mine are already stretched), are the same spec as the routers you will be running on the front-end of your incoming net feeds in a year or two. Props to Cisco and their investment and resulting product. Obviously Logitech will release a version based on open-source code in the near future which we can tweak to our own requirements, but heck - this is the Internet..
Just to recap.. the video on their website states it's just below 3W per Gbit.
They actually put up a photo here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cisco_pics/4406738473
Now... if i do the maths, that turns out to be 322000 Gbit * 3 = 966000W.
It strikes me as not very easy to handle from a heat dissipation point of view.
It's a subscription model. You pay them 90k/quarter and they keep bringing you their latest vaperware. Nice!
(been lurking for 8+ years, figured I ought to post someday)
LOL
exactly
try $90k times (322/1.12) + tax
=
$25.875 MILLION
source:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5763/prod_models_comparison.html
Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. (Or you could pump nearly one Library of Congress per second through the device, or give everyone in San Fransisco [their own private] 1Gbps internet connection.)
So that means we'll need maybe a thousand of these things to pipe the whole world's bandwidth? Doesn't seem like much of a market.
That is all.
A very slight rewording:
'The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate,' anticipates Cisco's John Chambers.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Dr. Chris Centeno posts several times at the end of the article and addresses most of the issues raised here. Definitely worth reading.
Cisco have a long history of saying their platforms can do xyz performance. The reality is that its almost never actually capable of doing those sorts of numbers. It's the same with almost all network providers.... The power point to reality converter was never actually working in the engineering lab at the time of release. Having worked in a HPC environment in the past where we had 6500's with 6748-GE-TX Blades with DFC's and Sup720-3BXL's all connected with 4 port 10GbE cards top of the line stuff for Ethernet switching and it used to constantly loose Layer2 and or crash, Cisco couldn't find the fault told us to upgrade to the Nexus and in the end we went with Foundry Networks (no Brocade) who could actually perform but had some software bugs which they worked on and fixed but should never have existed in the first place if they did QA.
Or reduce network reliability by reducing redundancy and introducing more critical choke points.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
last reports from the technician in Louisiana stated, "Dad-gum, this dohicky sure does spit out those bits. We can hook up trailers from here to kingdom come and still have plenty of highway." Real tests in California are still forthcoming.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
...take Windows 30 seconds to list what is in My Documents folder.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Actually, the question on my mind is if this device is really going to be used to just route bits at layer 3, or if such massive hardware is going to sell more as a very fast deep packet inspection layer 7 device. I think there are ISPs like AT&T that would love to go deeper...in every way.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
This is a load of horseshit.
They have this technology and I'm still being charged as if 12Mbps is a bleeding edge luxury.
Fuck you ISP.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I'm glad to see they are still coming out with bigger and better products. However why bother. Their interface (Ios command line) is decades old and has seen little improvements. Take some of the ideas of Juniper of having (Commit Confirm... Show | display-set... Simple XML api interface) :( @ Cisco :( :(
Cisco wants it both ways.
They want to sell "bandwidth expansion solutions" to the parts of the business that actually want more bandwidth available.
They will then turn around and sell "bandwidth constraining" solutions to the parts of the business that don't.
It's just like John Chamber's & Cisco -- stand in front of Congress demanding their corporate constitutional right to influence American politicians in the name of freedom, while at the same time selling products to the Communist Chinese to enable censorship and repression.
BFR-9000
Testing in Florida and Louisiana makes sense - how else are the Bible-belters supposed to get gay porn?
322TBit in theory is very good and all but does anyone knows what is the largest deployed router?
the only one I could found was:
http://www.huawei.com/news/view.do?id=10930&cid=42
beside, who would want to agregate so much traffic in one place? (beside the NSA)
Based on a brief look at Cisco.com, it looks like the CRS-3 scales from a single 4-slot chassis up to an 1192-slot multiple-rack array, so the amount of backplane capacity you get depends on what size chassis and how many chassis you want to chain together, as well as what flavors of interface cards you put in them. (A lot of the processing capacity is on the cards, which is how you get things to scale to carrier-class.) The small box is going to have supervisor CPUs and probably control-plane, and you'll presumably want redundant power supplies of some sort (though that may be DC if you're in a carrier environment), and probably a couple of GigE interfaces on the supervisor card, but it's not the kind of platform you buy without buying some hefty interface cards, which is where most of your money'd be going.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you can run Crysis on a VT-100 terminal, then yes, otherwise see if you can compile Nethack to run on IOS-XR :-)
Several decades ago, I had a CRT as the console for my VAX, instead of the more traditional Decwriter. One day I ran rogue from the console, and at some point needed to repeat a message, so I typed control-P. But instead of getting a response from rogue, I got the prompt from the LSI-11 console processor (D'oh!) Fortunately, since this was an 11/780, that didn't actually stop the VAX (like it would have with an 11/750), so I was able to connect back to the VAX CPU, save my game, and go restart it from a normal terminal.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What competitors?
One reason for systems this heavy is to support 100Gbps Ethernet trunking; most carrier routers are limited to 40Gbps or 10Gbps. Another reason is to support lots of cables at high speeds. All of those speeds are per-wavelength; you can multiplex large numbers of wavelengths on a single cable depending on what kind of optical switching gear you're using, but that's usually a Layer 1 question.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm surprised to hear that you're stuck with 768kbps DSL, unless you're either way out behind Stanford or in one of the politically-weird boundary neighborhoods like Whiskey Gulch. Check on www.att.com to see what they've got. Also, I'd think you could get cable modem service (again, unless you're in weird parts of PA or there's some regulatory annoyance because of PA's city-owned fiber network.) Neither one's going to be friendly about static IPs without gouging you. If you don't mind an annoyingly low 5GB cap, there's also 3G wireless.
I'm in Mountain View, debatably 11000 or 16000 wire-feet from the CO, and I've got 3Mbps DSL; I could probably get 6Mbps but haven't tried, and they've recently started offering U-verse so I can get much faster connections if I want them bundled with television, which I don't.
When I first got DSL, it was 384kbps SDSL because the lines weren't quite good enough for 768kbps SDSL, but that was the mid-90s, and whatever ADSL variant they're using this decade is a lot more flexible.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Deep inspection is done at the edges.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
What you need to really look at to compare technology growth is the backplane density, how many cabinets you need, how many interfaces of what kinds of speeds, prices, energy consumption, etc. The big marketing number isn't where you see Moore's Law sorts of effects, and the prices of optics don't behave the same way the prices of chips do.
The CRS-1 and CRS-3 are both really big honking routers - you don't get to 100Tbs speeds without ganging together a large number of chassis in multiple racks. And you don't typically use anywhere near that much routing in one place. Wikipedia reports that Google and AT&T were each carrying traffic in the 20 PByte/day range - that would be about 2Terabits/sec if it were spread out evenly over 24 hours. (It's not, of course, but it's also not all on the same fiber or same switch. A typical big US carrier has big switches in 20-40 cities, often in pairs for diversity, and some level of fiber meshing that reflects geography as well as traffic patterns and interface cost optimization.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
or give everyone in San Fransisco a 1Gbps internet connection
Or give everyone in San Francisco a 1 Gbps Internet connection! :-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
If you're going to gripe about the low Internet speeds we've got in the US, tell me what cool stuff you want to do with it, or what cool stuff the Japanese, Koreans, and Swedes are doing with theirs!
Other than running P2P file sharing faster, the big applications I keep hearing about for faster-than-3Mbs internet are Television and downloading movies from Internet TV competitors. ZZZZZ unless you like that sort of passive entertainment; you're basically just displacing the transport vendor selling you the same old material. It may let you negotiate lower prices for your TV, but it's still 500+ channels and nothing's on, except that it looks a bit better in 1080p.
Gaming? That's a job for low-latency sub-megabit bandwidth. At least the canonical Old People in Korea can see the specials at the local grocery store on video. Video Skype? Still doesn't need a lot of bandwidth, though it's better than video over 14.4kbps modems was.
Back in the Dark Ages, the @Home cable modem folks had two different opinions about Napster - the PR Droids would rant about Evil Content Thieves, but the engineers (and even most of the managers, if you asked them unofficially) would say "Duh, the reason people are buying broadband is to run Napster! Go Piracy!" But these day I can download most content far faster than I can watch it all. Go build something interesting so we need more bandwidth!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wikipedia's article on Petabytes says that archive.org has about three of them, though obviously that's a moving target...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
tell that to the *AA...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The CRS-1 look ahead of its time; 3x speed increase over 6 years. And is that really keeping up with internet growth ?
Nullius in verba
The wired speed is pretty good, but I also want to be able to stream HD movies on my home network.
From Cisco's web site, the CRS-3 has a base price of USD90,000.
90,000 * 10,000 = $900M
90,2000 * 20,0000 = $1.8B
LMAO. Yeah, the Linux community should set up a Paypal account, maybe, so they can ask for the rough billion or so dollars* to implement your "plan"...
That'll be a sterling success I'm sure.
* Said billion or so dollars doesn't actually include facilities for said devices, electricity, nor the small matter of the fiber optic mesh around the country to connect them...
Sorry, I'm still laughing...
I'm sure it would. Tell you what, I'll email Comcast, Verizon, TimeWarner's CEOs. They'll be pissing their pants and crying like little girls, definitely.
But a large fraction (perhaps 50%) of those conversations would be the Chinese language equivalent of: "Can you hear me now?"
Except for the fact that no carrier in the US will ever have speeds like that in the service life of said router, nor will expand their infrastructure to meet those demands.
Of course that's why CISCO is doing business elsewhere these days :V
We'll they can't complain now that there isn't enough bandwidth so they have to meter it now.
Sure they can. It'd just be lying. Dishonest. Factually incorrect.
But hey, they can accept $200 billion of they taxpayers' money, promising to deliver broadband internet everywhere and then not deliver on that promise. In my mind, that's equivalent to stealing ~$650 from every citizen.
So they have the moral to steal, but they're not going to lie. Riiiight...
How much for this regional router? :)
I bet diffserv/IPv6 label, then traffic classes, are properly supported. At last death for the POTS?
Now: I have roughtly 1Mb/s upload link... with FTTH I will have 50 Mb/s then 200 Mb/s (like in Japan).
That means 50 times and then 200 times... :D
Who said personal cloud?
or if such massive hardware is going to sell more as a very fast deep packet inspection layer 7 device.
There is no way they would be able to do deep packet inspection at those kinds of speeds. Just think about a 1TB hard drive. Now imagine 300 of them. Now, you want to inspect all that data in 1 second. It's just not going to happen. That's why it's listed as a core router - it's job is to move a LOT of data as fast as possible. In fact, other routers do extra work to reduce the processing done by the core routers.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Well, my point is that there is a greater "need" to inspect traffic at 50Tbps rather than move 322Tbps. Somewhat like how the Airbus A380 was advertised as being big enough for a basketball court, but the airlines decided that space was better suited to stick people in like cattle.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
the NSA and GCHQ will have all ready got theirs on order :-) though thats not actualy a joke