In the articles I've read and videos I've watched, they have mentioned varying amounts of reduced power. I didn't commit them to memory because that wasn't the part I was interested in at the moment.

The aggregate power load from the 1U boxes is by itself generally ( but not always ) going to be less than the equivalent sized big chassis. ( If you start having to add middle stages that can sometimes not hold true. ) 

On top of that, many designs allow for DACs to be used for a large percentage of connections, which also has significant power savings.

On Tue, Dec 24, 2024 at 8:28 AM Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net> wrote:
In the articles I've read and videos I've watched, they have mentioned varying amounts of reduced power. I didn't commit them to memory because that wasn't the part I was interested in at the moment.

Management of the things is a big thing I've been concerned about going into more modern systems. So often there's hand waiving regarding the orchestration piece of non-traditional systems. From what I've seen (and I would love to be wrong), you either build it in-house (not a small lift) or you buy something that ends up taking away all of the cost advantages that path had.

Failure domain stuff is part of what I'm trying to learn more about, which goes back to more about the fundamentals of how the fabric works.

From: "Christopher Morrow" <morrowc.lists@gmail.com>
To: "NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org>
Sent: Monday, December 23, 2024 6:05:12 PM
Subject: Re: Distributed Router Fabrics



On Mon, Dec 23, 2024 at 10:15 AM Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net> wrote:

Actually, as I read more about it and watch more videos about it, it seems like that isn't necessarily true. The claims they have at the top end surpass what any chassis platform I've seen is capable of, though I don't know that they actually have pushed the upper bounds of what's possible in the real world.


I wonder how large a failure domain folk are willing to accept.

I also don't know that it's actually better to have 1 thing vs N things, since management of the
things is probably the expensive part (once you get past space/power which don't seem to be
part of the calculations here (not in my brief read of the thread at least).

-chris