the power/cooling budget for a rack full of router vs a rack full of cores might be distinction to make. I know that historically, the data center operator made no distinction and a client decided to "push past the envelope" and replaced their kit with space heaters. most data centers now are fairly restrictive on the power/cooling budget for a given footprint. --bill On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 01:08:23PM -0400, Warren Kumari wrote:
On Sep 24, 2010, at 6:22 AM, Venkatesh Sriram wrote:
Hi,
Can somebody educate me on (or pass some pointers) what differentiates a router operating and optimized for data centers versus, say a router work in the metro ethernet space? What is it thats required for routers operating in data centers? High throughput, what else?
While this question has many dimensions and there is no real definition of either I suspect that what many people mean when they talk about a DC routers is: Primarily Ethernet interfaces High port density Designed to deal with things like VRRP / VLAN / ethernet type features. Possibly CAM based, possibly smaller buffers. Less likely to be taking full routes.
This is very similar to the religious debate about "What's the difference between a 'real' router and a L3 switch?"
Just my 2 cents. W
Thanks, Venkatesh
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