[c-nsp] DWDM optics on 6500s

[Nick Hilliard]

On 05/10/2009 22:41, Mark Tinka wrote:
> That said, it's also clear the 6500 isn't done yet, and it's
> still got a number of tricks up its sleeve. The question is,
> "Will you wait?".

The c6500 is just a chassis.  So, if you're referring to the trick of 
upgrading both the line cards and the supervisor engine to something 
better, then yes, it's got more tricks up its sleeve.

As a side issue, there are electrical limitations imposed by the physical 
cross-bar unit inside the actual chassis, but I don't know how much of a 
problem these limitations are in practice.  Perhaps the problem of getting 
reliable 20G+ parallel data transfers across the backplane is greater than 
dealing with the bandwidth limitations imposed by the electrical 
characteristics of the physical crossbar.  Being hardware-related, this 
sort of stuff is well beyond my sphere of knowledge, and for all I know, 
c65k's operate using hoards of maxwell's daemons being slave-driven by 
microscopic evil pixies.

Nick