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Technology Stocks : Juniper Networks - JNPR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Phoenix who wrote (1814)	10/20/2000 9:20:16 PM
From: Frederick	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3350

Concerning switch fabrics for gig routers, Your question is a good one. The highest performance switches in use today are single stage crossbars, which can get you up to the 100s of gigabits. And that is about the best we are going to see in the near term, IMHO. Avici uses a highly distributed system architecture that grows the switching and processing capacity as they add chassis. They are able to scale their system through direct interconnection on the backplane. Juniper uses a shared memory system, which is surprising that they can even get up to 80 Gbps with that. But they will need something more powerful to keep up with these new guys. Nexabit (Lucent) claims to have a terabit fabric, the problem is they can only put in enough I/O for 160 gigs, so what good is it? I don't believe the terabit hype, either, not today, anyway. Frankly, it really doesn't matter what the vendor claims they can do on the backplane, I just count I/O, which is usually a much lower number. Avici can do about 200 Gbps per bay, and as far as I know, they have only interconnected two bays, for a max of 400 Gbps based on I/O capacity. You have probably heard of Richard Norman at Hyperchip; he claims to have figured out a way to build a petabit router, using 100,000 gates and massively parallel systems. And Growth Networks, purchased by Cisco last year, claims to have developed a multi-terabit system based on a multi-stage interconnection network. Time will tell.