At long last, March 9 is here. Cisco had a running timer on its Web site counting down to 11 a.m. eastern this morning when they would make an announcement that, they claim, would change the Internet forever.
Based on the hype that Cisco and much of the media created, I’m not sure what I was expecting but my expectations were high. So what was it? Today Cisco launched its new carrier core router, CRS-3. The CRS-3 is the evolution of a product Cisco launched a few years back, CRS-1, which, at the time, set the high water mark for carrier routers. Upon its release, many people chuckled at the concept of a 92 Tbps router, thinking we’ll never need that kind of bandwidth, but what we found was that indeed we do! Cisco has shipped almost 5000 CRS-1’s–clearly, there’s demand.
In comparison, the CRS-3 is a behemoth. It’s 100 Gig-E ready with a total switching capacity for 322 Tbps. In theory, one could download every movie ever made in about 4 minutes. It’s also IPv6 ready, clearly designed to handle the explosion of mobile devices, and it’s optimized to work with Cisco’s data center products UCS and Nexus, meaning it’s “cloud ready” as well. The CRS-3 is over 10x the speed of the closest competitive product and does indeed set a new high bar for networking.
Cisco sees the bandwidth being driven by the convergence of mobility, cloud computing and video. This is similar to the vision Yankee Group laid out at the start of 2008 where we predicted that an Anywhere Enterprise would be driven by the convergence of cloud, mobility and social media. We continue to see these as big drivers with video being a very specific form of social media.
In the enterprise markets this means growth of bandwidth intensive applications such as workload mobility, unified communications, videoconferencing and Telepresence. Moving these complex applications to the cloud certainly decreases the complexity level for enterprises and allows the network operators to move from being a vendor of commodity services to a strategic partner.
In the consumer markets, the vision of converged mobility, video and cloud means more high bandwidth cloud based video and real time gaming services. HD TV is here and 3D TV is right around the corner and these will be huge drivers of bandwidth.
Overall Cisco estimates that each person will consume 15TB of data between our personal and professional lives every month. Is the 15 TB a real number? Maybe and maybe not. But the fact remains, we use all the bandwidth we’re given and will continue to.
So, did the Cisco CRS-3 live up to the immense hype that preceded it? No, I don’t think so. But they did set a very high bar. It’s a good solid announcement that will allow network operators to put a foundation in place to drive differentiated multimedia and mobile services.
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