The CRS family of routers focus on extreme scale, and the new CRS-X is no exception. One standard 7 ft rack chassis CRS-X deployment can deliver up to 12.8 terabits per second. The system can be clustered together in a massive configuration of up to 72 chassis, which would deliver up to 922 Tbps of throughput. The original CRS-1 in a similar clustered configuration could only scale up to 92 Tbps.
The CRS-X delivers such massive scale thanks in part to an enhanced fabric backplane that can enable a new generation of line cards. The CRS-X can now handle up to 400 Gbps per slot, up from only 40 Gbps on the CRS-1 and 140 Gbps on the current CRS-3.
There is now also a 4x 100GbE line card that can be plugged into each of the CRS-X router’s 16 slots, delivering a total of 64 x 100 GbE ports.
Stephen Liu, director of service provider marketing at Cisco, told Enterprise Networking Planet that the new 100 GbE port density on the CRS-X chassis originated in technology that Cisco gained from the acquisition of optical networking vendor Lightwave in February of 2012.
Read the full story at Enterprise Networking Planet:
Cisco’s CRS-X Router Packs 12.8 Tbps
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.