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Home > Packet Pushers - Weekly Show > Show 190 – The Silicon Inside Your Network Device Part 3
Podcast: Packet Pushers - Weekly Show
Episode:

Show 190 – The Silicon Inside Your Network Device Part 3
Category: Technology
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2014-06-02 14:00:26
Description:


The third and final episode in the very popular series on where we attempt to discover what really happens inside your network device.

Although software will be at heart of network innovation for the next decade, it will still run on hardware and it’s time to expose the internals of our network hardware and understand the hardware architecture inside a typical device. Many people are surprised to find that CPUs, memory, storage and buses are similar to computers while the forwarding engines are rather spectacularly different.

Thanks to our guests for working very hard to bring this show to you.the-silicon-inside-your-network-part-3

Chassis

  • Choice of Bus (stack), Crossbar, multi-stage fabric. (see attached document on hw/ evolution)
  • Multi-stage requires dedicated fabric and fabric interface ASICs, Clos networks (just hidden from view)
  • Important technology such as Virtual Output Queueing – Helps fix Head of line blocking.
  • Non-blocking? – Take half your ASIC ports and point them backwards to the fabric.

Hardware knowledge in the real world:

  • People familiar with to tradeoffs – SDM prefer for 3750
  • Commodity ASICs => better price but with more tradeoff and caveats => much more careful engineering.
  • Cisco Nexus 9K => Fantastic innovation. Take precious resources (forwarding tables) and make the Fabric ASIC do LPM and make the linecard ASIC do host routes.
  • OpenCompute- A great breakdown of the different technologies. – Pluggable modules / swappable CPUs etc.

Links

Video – Fiber cleaning and testing – The Network Sherpa

What is the Definition of a Switch Fabric ? – EtherealMind

Clos network – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Previous Episodes

Show 187 The Silicon Inside Your Network Device Part 2

Show 186 The Silicon Inside Your Network Device Part 1

The post Show 190 – The Silicon Inside Your Network Device Part 3 appeared first on Packet Pushers.
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