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To: Douglas Nordgren who wrote (19301)	2/27/2000 7:01:00 PM
From: cmg	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42804

Start with clustering. Charlotte?s Web Networks, Lucent, and Nortel use interface ports to cluster their routers, reducing the port density on the box. Charlotte?s Web Networks? Aranea, for example, clusters 32 chassis using special modules that consume up to 25 percent of the box?s interfaces. The other vendors claim to scale using their switching fabric rather than interfaces. Port counts also need to be looked at in the context of the space in the Point of Presence (POP). With space at a premium, operators aren?t concerned only with getting high port densities per chassis; they also want high port densities for the seven-foot racks that house the gear. Some of that is obvious. With 159Gbits/sec of throughput, one 64000 will match over 15 Everest boxes. However, there are some less obvious factors, like chassis width. Here again the FPGA design hurts the Everest. The Everest?s chassis is 23-inches wide instead of the usual 19 inches, says Joe Durkin, senior product manager at Tellabs. The problem? Some installations only have racks 19 inches wide. Then consider the impact resilience will have on the port counts. Cisco?s 12016, for example, can be equipped with redundant route processor cards, but that means burning a slot for I/O ports. Tellabs has a similar problem. The Everest sports four interface cards for I/O processing. Each interface card handles traffic coming in from four line cards. To gain redundancy in the I/O processing modules, network architects can designate an interface card as a backup, but in doing so they can?t utilize the four I/O processing modules. ?In practice, very few customers take advantage of the redundancy for that very reason,? says Durkin. Finally, check out the distances between nodes in a cluster. Some vendors rely on Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) to extend the distance between clustered nodes. Tellabs, for example, can hit 26 kilometers between nodes. This enables operators to ensure greater resilience by locating nodes on different floors or in different buildings. Other vendors operate under much tighter distance constraints. Avici requires nodes to be connected directly together.

To: Douglas Nordgren who wrote (19301)	2/27/2000 10:21:00 PM
From: George Dawson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42804

On the Terabit Router Market: Douglas, Very informative post. Combining this with some information I posted on the Ancor thread and doing a little arithmetic results in a potentially interesting size of the TB router market. There are about 4.4 billion IP addresses out there and this of course will increase with bigger pipes. Using crude approximations of specific bandwidths for a fraction of these addresses, 70% peak efficiency, and arbitrary TB routers results in a fairly sizable market. Of course all that bandwidth needs to be switched out from the routers. Does anyone know the approximate cost of the competing routers? George