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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
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
CIA/NSA software loaded to do deep packet inspection?
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
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?
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
Speak for yourself, Mr. FullOfYourself!
I think seeing a big impressive machine is always cool. It’s the same reason I like hearing about the newest supercomputer.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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.
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
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.
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
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.