Chiaro Debuts a Big, Bad Router

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veluthuru 12/5/2012 | 12:01:52 AM

re: Chiaro Debuts a Big, Bad Router
We had moved to the Dallas area from California couple of years back to join a local startup.

Locally, Chiaro was touted as having the most seasoned routing people. What I found when I interviewed was a bunch of developers
with 15-20 years experience - they would not let me in since I did not have as much "experience".
This kind of attitude pretty much speaks for most of the startups in the Dallas area.

Perception is more important than substance - this attitude is coming from the Nortel's of the region and is hard to change or have a successful startup culture.

I doubt there is any hope for this company. I would be very interested in hearing from the likes of Skeptic.

Well, I am heading back to California as soon as
I can.

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jim_smith 12/5/2012 | 12:01:50 AM

re: Chiaro Debuts a Big, Bad Router BTW, why are you so interested in skeptic's answer? Is he based in the Dallas area? Do you know him/her personally?

The party is over for the folks that you interviewed with. They will be replaced sooner rather than later by programmers in (alphabetical order) China, Eastern Europe, India, and Russia. Future companies won't turn you down because of your lack of experience, but they will turn you down if they can't afford you...

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skeptic 12/5/2012 | 12:01:48 AM

re: Chiaro Debuts a Big, Bad Router I doubt there is any hope for this company. I would be very interested in hearing from the likes of Skeptic.
-------------

Chiaro is competing for business with caspian
and procket now. On the positive side, they
have announced two small sales (with names) and
they went through an outside evaluation. On
the negative side, as the article suggests their
density isn't all that great. And they will
be fighting it out *to the death* with caspian
and procket for what core router opportunities
there are. None of these companies can afford
to lose any of what business there is.

Chiaro's pushing reliability hard with service
providers. If their story proves itself out
in real lab trials, it will be an advantage.
But the history on that isn't real good. Avici
talked big and then fell on its face when people
did real tests.

I've written off hyperchip until they make some
sort of annoucement about something. They
can't have much money left.

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changeisgood 12/5/2012 | 12:01:46 AM

re: Chiaro Debuts a Big, Bad Router >>The Enstara can scale up to 315 OC192 ports from day one.

hey, i am *somewhat* familiar with the big ip backbones and 315xOC192 in a POP will not be needed until 2099. their business model created years ago is no longer valid and they will die soon.

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skeptic 12/5/2012 | 12:01:42 AM

re: Chiaro Debuts a Big, Bad Router hey, i am *somewhat* familiar with the big ip backbones and 315xOC192 in a POP will not be needed until 2099. their business model created years ago is no longer valid and they will die soon.
-------------------

I think what you and others miss when looking
at core routers is that there is a difference
between "capacity" and what gets deployed. All
the companies in this space are claiming huge
scalability. The question for chiaro/procket
/caspian/et al is how flexabile the equipment
is in deployment and the upgrade path when
scale needs to be added.

The last generation of core routers had inflexable
backplanes which limited their life or at the
least made upgrades really complex. The new
generation of core routers, from all vendors
including cisco (HFR) and juniper (the external
switch & interconnect), is focused on
expandable backplanes and modular equipment.
They all claim different levels of scalability
and have different approaches but they all
involve modular expansion.

The question at those big ip networks isn't
so much *what it scales to* as *how easy can
I add capacity*. All the players in the core
have to answer that question.

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Belzebutt 12/5/2012 | 12:01:30 AM

re: Chiaro Debuts a Big, Bad Router In one corner we have Tony Li, in the other corner we have an optical switch fabric... who would win in a fight?

The optical switch fabric is based on an optical phased array and can switch ports at nanosecond speeds, but Tony Li helped design the GSR and the M40 and has several RFCs under his belt... it's a close call!

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signmeup 12/5/2012 | 12:01:28 AM

re: Chiaro Debuts a Big, Bad Router But isn't clustering exactly what Chiaro is betting on? A single Chiaro chassis can only support 100 Gb/s (in/out), so where is the 315 OC-192's coming from?

The real question is who needs 315 OC-192's right now anyway? It appears that most of the major players have been focused on adding more density in smaller spaces, not adding less density in larger spaces.

The problem comes down to investment protection. Everyone want a box that can scale from 1 Gb to 20 Tb without having to replace chassis, linecards, media adapters, route processors, ect. Given the densities Chiaro is purporting, I'm not you could house the thing at 20 TB - we're gonna need a bigger boat....

signmeup

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skeptic 12/5/2012 | 12:01:28 AM

re: Chiaro Debuts a Big, Bad Router , both of these comanies have announced clustering capabilities to scale to many times that number.
--------------
There are lots of people who don't particularly
like the clustering approach. Depending on
how its done, it might work. But as often as
not, vendors are pushing "clustering" as a
stop-gap either because something didn't work
or something else is in progress. Cisco seems
to revive clustering as an idea whenever they
need to fill an inconvenent gap. But it never
happens.

As far as approaches, juniper has the most
chance of making clustering work. Procket's
story on clusters is so vague that I'm not
sure its real. And caspian (which is sort
of a cluster approach) comes with micro-flow
baggage.

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signmeup 12/5/2012 | 12:01:28 AM

re: Chiaro Debuts a Big, Bad Router The main problem I see with Chiaro is that with all of its fancy optical phased array switch fabric it tends to be about 5 times as big physically with less density as other solutions. Anyone remember Monterrey Networks? Now that was a beast!

Taken directly from the article:
"the Enstara is only capable of supporting 100 Gbit/s of I/O (input/output) in a single system and only 200 Gbit/s in a rack."

"Though the Enstara can scale up to 315 OC192 ports from day one, it would take roughly 15 racks of telco space to achieve that capacity,"

So if we compare that to existing solutions available today, Juniper's T640 supports 640 Gb/s and Procket's 8812 supports 960 Gb/s in a HALF RACK! In addition, both of these comanies have announced clustering capabilities to scale to many times that number. Procket can reach 315 OC-192's in 3 1/2 racks - that's 76% less rack space and power required!

Given the fact that we all know what Tony has accomplished in past lives, I don't see how Chiaro is even in the same ring with these guys.....

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changeisgood 12/5/2012 | 12:01:25 AM

re: Chiaro Debuts a Big, Bad Router >> The real question is who needs 315 OC-192's right now anyway?

or when will someone need 315 x OC192 layer3 in a box? i would bet that some of the biggest IP POPs in the world have less than 12 x OC192 for WAN links, use NxGbE or 10GbE LAN-PHY for the layer 2 intraPOP aggregation (peering, edge boxes, distribution layer stuff) on the drop side of their core routers. then you split those WAN links over two boxes - because service providers have traditionally wanted two boxes or more side-by-side for resiliency. i wish more than anybody that we will see 300 x OC192 (turned on) in any core router.

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