Three days after Cisco Systems Inc. unveiled the Carrier Routing System 3, industry experts continue to speculate on the 322 Terabit per second speed.
The day Cisco announced CRS 3, a senior executive with Juniper Networks Inc. claimed CRS 1, announced in 2004 with a top speed of 92 Tbps, has not been installed in anything larger than an eight-chassis configuration.
This is significant because both CRS 1 and CRS 3 start at speeds of about one Tbps. The 92 Tbps speed of CRS refers to the speed you could get if you combined 72 chassis. Likewise for the 322 Tbps speed of CRS 3.
When Network World Canada asked Cisco to confirm Juniper’s claim, Cisco neither confirmed nor denied it, even though we did not ask Cisco to name any particular carriers who were running the CRS 1.
Juniper is not exactly a disinterested observer in all of this, because Juniper also makes routers for carriers. Its top speed, when you combine T1600 routers, is 25 Tbps.
But on Friday, Jennifer Pigg, senior vice-president of Yankee Group Research Inc., also questioned the top speed of CRS 3.
“No one is going to string together 72 23 inch chassis, each three feet deep and over six feet high, to achieve the parlor trick of the 322 Terabit router,” she wrote. “I’m not saying that we’ll never need a 322Tbps core router. I’m just saying that when we do – it’s not going to be delivered by the CRS-3.”
Still, Pigg wrote, it lets Cisco boast that it has the highest-capacity core router.
