What Would You Do With a 92 TBps Router?

enodev writes "Cisco announces today it's new 'Carrier routing system' For a price tag starting at $450,000 it's able to route up to 92 Tbps. It also features IOS-XR and the first optical OC-768c/STM-256c optical Interface." update changed TBps to Tbps and suddenly things seemed less cool ;)

More info....

[Mz6]

Well, I was going to comment and see what, if anything, Juniper Networks [juniper.net] was going to come out with but I found a NYTimes article to answer it otherwise [nytimes.com]. Here's a snippet:

"Juniper Networks has individual routers that are at least as fast, but the company cannot combine as many routers to ultimately produce the same speeds, according to Chris Nicoll, a telecommunications industry analyst with Current Analysis, a research firm."

and more....

"The new router design is the first developed by Cisco that allows several routers to be connected, according to the company. A single router would be able to transmit data at 1.2 terabits a second. But as many as 72 routers can be hooked together to send data at 92 terabits a second, far faster than any router sold now. In telecommunications, data transfer is usually measured in bits per second. A terabit is one trillion bits. "

Terabits, not terabytes

[jfengel]

It's a small point, but the article calls it 92 Tbps, not 92 TBps. Which means its really 19 terabytes per second, which works out to some ungodly number of libraries of congress per fortnight. Either way, it's a lot.

Get your units right

[dsanfte]

Terabits/sec (Tbps), not Terabytes/sec (TBps).

I'm not surprised some moron doesn't know his units, especially when it's mentioned in the article and placed in its proper notation. I'm surprised the EDITORS refuse to change it to be factual.

IOS XR is QNX

[Anonymous Coward]

Who says you can't get performance from a microkernel [qnx.com]?

This was the product whose internal development code name was HFR (Huge Fscking Router).

Sweet!

p.s.
Note the other key word "self-healing".

Re: Not IOS though

[CAIMLAS]

Did you bother to even look at the site? Nooo of course not. From the site:

The Cisco CRS-1 is powered by Cisco IOS XR Software, a unique self-healing and self-defending operating system designed for always-on operation while scaling system capacity up to 92 Tbps.

Click on "Cisco IOS XR" and you get:

Q. What is Cisco IOS XR Software?

A. Cisco IOS XR Software is the newest member of the Cisco IOS Software Family. Cisco IOS XR has been developed to address the requirements for scale, availability, and service flexibility which arise from the creation of converged packet infrastructures that consolidate voice, video, and data services. Cisco IOS XR Software has been specifically optimized to take advantage of the massively distributed processing capabilities of the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System.


Why do you even bother posting? I wouldn't think it's for karma whoring - such a low UID isn't likely to partake in such things unless adicted. It certainly isn't to contribute quality material to the discussion, either.

Re: Not IOS though

[vangilder]

An article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday [wsj.com] mentioned that they were getting rid of IOS in favor of something more "user-friendly." Their big competition is Juniper and, in order to sell more boxen (routen?) they have had to answer to complaints about IOS. Also, the article mentioned that IOS wass getting to be around 15e6 lines of code, and was impossible to maintain. Yay for a free market where consumers can actually vote with thier wallet and compaines have to respond or someone else will.

Re: Not IOS though

[Mateito]

What do you mean "Not IOS"?

All your questions are answered here:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5763/produ ct s_qanda_item09186a008022e09b.shtml

Re:Terabits, not terabytes

[crashnbur]

Last I checked, a byte is 8 bits, so 92 TB would actually be 11.5 Tb.

Re:its a shame

[corrosiv]

It's not running IOS.

Re:I would

[wo1verin3]

thats probably the worst use of the cliche i've ever seen, you should be ashamed of yourself.

In soviet russia, you could get a cheap knock off for 20 bux. Something like the C-C-C-Carrier R-R-R-Routing S-S-S-System. I'm sure you can find that on ebay.

Re: Not IOS though

[trailerparkcassanova]

IOS isn't suitable for service-provider products. A few years ago when I worked for Cisco they were just starting this project and were also starting to architect a new OS. Believe it or not they intended to call it CHAOS; Cisco High-Availabilty Operating System. Shoe phones not included.

Re: Not IOS though

[sphealey]

You know those crazy guys at the Wall Street Journal news division, always getting things wrong:

Cisco is taking a gamble with its counterattack, scrapping the software included in nearly every Cisco product since the company was founded two decades ago in favor of a new operating system designed to make the router easier to maintain and manage. "This is probably Cisco's most important" new product for telecom carriers, says Gabriel Lowy, an analyst for Blaylock & Partners LP. "The core router company wants to remain the core router company."

Wall Street Journal, Midwest Edition, May 24, 2004.

(subscription only so you will have to dig a paper copy out of the trash). There is other interesting discussion in the article as well.

With that settled, could we get back to discussing the questions I posed? I am still interested in what router and technology buying dudes have to say.

sPh

Re:STM256!

[vyzar]

You can be sure it will actually be STM-256c as opposed to plain vanilla STM-256.

Almost NO datacomms equipment manufacturers support the non-concatenated versions of SDH above STM-1. I have bitten in the past by companies that said they support STM-4 when they actually meant STM-4c. And of course at the time the telcos only support STM-4 and NOT STM-4c.

I suspect that the STM-256 support will be the same.

(For the uninitiated STM-4 is a straight multiplexing of 4 STM-1s, each with their own header and payload sections. STM-4c is essentially one big STM channel with a single header section and a single concatenated payload section. STM-256c just extends this principle to more insane capacities).

Re: Not IOS though

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe IOS XR is what was called internally ENA. This was an attempt to rewrite IOS from scratch - IOS was aparently very hard to make robust and to maintain, essentially operting in a single memory space. ENA was rumoured to a multi-process architecture running on QNX. But re-writing IOS is a really hard task, and Cisco seem to have lost faith in ENA at some point, reducing the platforms supported to only be the HFR.

They took another track with the rest of their product line, which was to slowly migrate from the original IOS monolith to a multi-process architecture, without a complete re-write.

But my information is out of date, so the situation may have changed somewhat.

92 Tbps not 92 TBps

[Anonymous Coward]

Type-o or not, the slashdot post doesn't agree with cisco's own information. They say 92 Tbps, not 92 TBps. That's a difference of only 644 Tbps (80.5 TBps), but who's counting?

CISCO Using QNX

[Kilkonie]

I think the more interesting story might be what it's running.

QNX Powers Universal Media Gateway for Next-Generation Digital Video Networks [qnx.com]
QNX Software Systems today announced that the QNX® Neutrino® realtime operating system (RTOS) will be shipping as part of the Cisco uMG9850 QAM Module, a new quadrature amplitude modulation product designed to let cable operators use Gigabit Ethernet to deliver video-on-demand and other multimedia services efficiently and cost-effectively to TV set-top receivers.

'Little OS that could' just might [com.com]
"In a deal signed two years ago, Cisco (csco) chose QNX as its preferred real-time OS vendor as part of Cisco's 'ongoing efforts to increase the reliability and availability of data-voice-video networks.' Since then, not much seems to have materialized from the partnership."

Cisco's HFR is here [nwfusion.com]
"The IOS-XR operating system kernel was acquired from QNX Software Systems, a small Canadian developer of realtime operating system code to companies in the automotive, communications, defense, industrial automation and medical device markets. Cisco already ships QNX operating system code in its uMG9850 QAM digital video module for the Catalyst 4500 Gigabit Ethernet switch."

Cisco Unveils the HFR [lightreading.com]
" The transition is analagous to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT - message board) moving from DOS-based operating systems to Windows NT, says analyst Stephen Kamman of CIBC World Markets.

Just as NT did, IOS XR could begin trickling down to lower-level systems, eventually permeating Cisco's entire portfolio, including edge and enterprise boxes. "The question is how quickly they can push that software through the product line," Kamman says."

"The software is based on a kernel licensed from QNX Software Systems, but tailored for the job. 'We have made some pretty substantial modifications to [the QNX code] that are Cisco proprietary,' Volpi says."

[Disclaimer: This is a very happy QNX Employee.]

Re: Not IOS though

[silas_moeckel]

It's a redesigned backend but they have redesigned the backend before most recently for the GSR's (the 12k line) I was implemeting them when they first shipped and while the front end is the same the bad end was rather different. This is nothing new for Cisco everything is pretty much C modules that get compiled for the new artitecture and/or written for the new hardware. It's realy not that hard to replace a software bit with hardware by just writting a wrapper module.

A side note read the specs for the OC768 Module it is clear channel only no sub interfaces this beast is realy only for interconnecting these things at 40gbps thats a lot of bandwith on one pipe.

Re:I know exactly what I'd do

[monkeydo]

The smallest interface you can get on these is an OC-48. That's approx. 48 T3's.

Re:Terabits, not terabytes

[Bios_Hakr]

There may or may not be parity, start/stop bits, CRC, or other overhead added to that number. It could mean that it does 92Tbps before the overhead, or after.

Yes, one byte is 8 bits, but there is usually a lot of variance in that number when you talk line speed.