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 > > > > -- > Consider orang-utans. > In all the worlds graced by their presence, it is suspected that they > can talk but choose not to do so in case humans put them to work, > possibly in the television industry. In fact they can talk. It's just > that they talk in Orang-utan. Humans are only capable of listening in > Bewilderment. > -- Terry Practhett > >
