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dwx
User Ranking
Thursday December 6, 2012 1:16:33 PM

ALU has a leg up on both Juniper and Cisco at this point.  

Juniper's NG box is already here, it's the PTX and for 100G it's currently at 6.4Tbps using Cisco full-duplex math, via 4x100G per slot (2 2x100G PICs) with 8 slots.   The PTX has been shipping with this for some time now, and the next fabric/interface upgrade is probably still some time away, probably not until 2014.  

Cisco has a NG core box on the horizon but from rumors I've gleaned it will have the same capacity as the ALU XRS but in a larger 23" form factor box which does 10x100G per slot with 8 slots.  

From what I remember the XRS will initially be shipping with the 2x100G XMAs available and not the 4x100G ones, so the capacity would be 40x100GE, but the fabric, etc. is there to support 80x100GE.  

The back to back virtual chassis technology without burning up front side interfaces is also a plus in my book and rumor is the Cisco box will support the same thing, Juniper has no way to do it with the PTX.  

Craig Matsumoto
User Ranking
Thursday December 6, 2012 2:15:44 AM

AlcaLu notes that the XRS is doing 8Tbit/s per rack in the lab (quad 100G line cards, basically), so we've added mention of that. It starts shipping in Q1.

AlcaLu would also like to point out that the 3.2Tbit/s of the CRS-3 isn't non-blocking; the maximum non-blocking bandwidth is 2.24Tbit/s.

Craig Matsumoto
User Ranking
Wednesday December 5, 2012 10:14:49 AM
no ratings

Cisco and Juniper must be working on their next-generation core routers, right? Wonder how long AlcaLu's density advantage will last.



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