Cisco recently announced its latest 800G innovations that the company hopes will continue to “transform the economics and sustainability of the Internet for the Future.” The company also looks to help its customers connect the approximately 40 percent of the world’s population that remains unconnected or underserved.
Bandwidth may continue to grow, but there’s only so much space and power to go around, according to Cisco. Those limitations are why dense and power-efficient platforms are necessary. Cisco said it will double communication service provider and Webscale customer backbones, metro core, and data center networks’ capabilities compared to 400G/100G modular solutions.
The company’s new 28.8Tbps/36 x 800G line card for Cisco 8000 Series Routers is powered by Cisco Silicon One. The new line card lowers operational costs and protects investments as communication service providers and cloud operators transform networks from 100G to 400G, and 800G capacities, according to the company. Additionally, customers can benefit from carbon savings by using less hardware to scale, and equipment reuse.
“We continue to expand 800G to more use cases, from AI/ML fabrics to the core, to help our customers meet their performance and sustainability goals,” said Kevin Wollenweber, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Networking, Data Center and Provider Connectivityt. “With our dense core and spine solutions using new double density line cards with Cisco Silicon One, we have accelerated the transition to 800G anywhere.”
In its announcement, Cisco focused on four key benefits of its 8000 Series Router Systems — economics, sustainability, innovation and operational simplicity. An estimated 83 percent space savings allows customers to build denser networks with a lot of the same infrastructure that can support 5G, Internet of Things (IoT) and broadband.
In terms of sustainability, Cisco forecasts its 800G systems can yield up to 68 percent power savings, allowing its customers to meet their sustainability goals.
“Colt is working towards ESG By Design, which means our firm commitment to sustainability spans every part of our business,” said Kelsey Hopkinson, VP-ESG, Colt Technology Services. “It’s imperative that we work with partners that share our values and strive to build a better, cleaner planet. Cisco’s latest routing innovation shows its dedication to finding powerful and effective ways of scaling capacity, whilst mitigating the environmental impact. It marks an exciting next stage in the future of sustainable digital infrastructure.”
The Cisco Silicon One P100 ASICs and Cisco pluggable optics help drive the new line card’s “architectural innovations” benefit. Customers will have the ability to scale up to 800G to support increasing traffic demands with four, eight, twelve, and 18-slot chassis. Additionally, customers can scale up to 518 Tbps capacity with a single 18-slot modular 800G system.
Cisco’s new line also promises simplicity. The combination of advanced visualization dashboards, services monitoring with actionable insights and closed-loop network optimization ensures customers consistent services quality of experiences.
“Based on our extensive market research and traffic analysis, we are forecasting continued growth in data traffic with fixed and mobile services, including for 5G, broadband, IoT and cloud,” said Simon Sherrington, Research Director, Analysis Mason. “These trends are putting networks under increasing pressure, which is why scaling to 800G throughput in the future with solutions such as Cisco 8000 will be in demand, while helping service providers and cloud providers improve operational efficiency, sustainability, and user experience.”
