Cisco debuts new 322Tbps core router

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 10 March 2010 09:07

IT Industry - Strategy

After weeks of expectation-building hype that on the eve or the announcement gave its shares a four percent boost, Cisco has released the CRS-3, a successor to its top end core router, the CRS-1, with more than triple the throughput: up to 322Tbps, as against 92Tbps.

Impressive though the CRS-3 is, the general feeling among commentators and reporters has been that the reality did not justify the hype. However for trivia buffs, Cisco claims that, with 322Tbps, a single CRS-3 would enable the entire 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.

Cisco claims that the 322Tbps represents a throughput more than 12 times that of any other core router on the market and "offers dramatic operational expense savings and up to 60 percent savings on power consumption compared to competitive platforms."

The basic CRS-3 is a four slot single shelf unit with a throughput of 1.12Tbps. Eight and 16 slot single shelf units offer throughputs of 2.24 and 4.48Tbps respectively, the latter being the size of a large wardrobe. The 322Tbps is achieved with a massive 1152 slot multishelf unit.

(Juniper Networks offers the T1600, which at its launch in 2007 offered 1.6Tbps per chassis and was claimed to be "the industry's highest capacity, most energy efficient single-chassis core router." In February 2009 Juniper upped the ante with release of the Juniper Control System (JCS) 1200 enabling up to sixteen T1600s to be integrated into a single multi-chassis routing node with a throughput of 25Tbps that can managed as a single, unified router.)

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