[c-nsp] Typhoon support on XRe

[Tom Hill]

Hi James,

On 01/05/17 18:29, James Jun wrote:
> Yep, the Powerglide LCs are out and shipping now supposedly:
> 
> http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/routers/asr-9000-series-aggregation-services-routers/datasheet-c78-738704.html

Ah-ha! Good spot.

> It says line card supports LAN optics only, and that seems vague.  I believe
> what the datasheet meant was that WAN-PHY is not supported (only LAN-PHY), but
> at the same time, I'm having hard time finding a list of supported passive
> DWDM optics for this card.  I'll have to check with our SE; the supported
> DWDM SFP+ module datasheet does not reference this new card, only the Typhoon
> 24x/36x10G cards.

I'd be surprised if they didn't 'just work', given the listed support
for 10GBASE-ZR, but better safe than sorry I suppose.

> Due to the way FIA's are arranged, the LC is slightly oversubscribed. 
> 24x10G/1G I believe is rated for 200 Gbps (so it has one Tigershark FIA,
> one Tomahawk NP) and 48x is for 400 Gbps (2x Tigershark, 2x Tomahawk NP5s)

Not too bad. Particularly if one expects to use at least a small number
of ports as 1G, or partial-rate 10G services.

> Looking at the GPL, the new 24x10G/1G card is a bit cheaper than the equivalent
> Typhoon 24x10G card, and takes noticeably less power, as there is single NPU
> and FIA complex driving the whole card.  So it does seem like cost effective
> upgrade for new greenfield A9K deployments.

Hmm, looks like itprice.com need to get their gpl version updated...!

The 24x10G Typhoon card was always an expensive sod, but the
oversubscription (in terms of PPS) was very, very low. A good card if
you're taking on a lot of DoS traffic regularly, but part of the reason
it's so damned expensive.


> Knowing Cisco, I have a feeling most of Typhoon is going to go EOS sooner than
> we'd prefer to think.  It's going to get progressively harder to maintain 32-bit
> code simultaneously with 64-bit in the long run, hence why new Tomahawk 10G cards
> are out to encourage customers to migrate as their equipment life cycles come up.

So that's one school of thought. On the other hand, I personally expect
QNX to live on a lot longer, in order to provide support for the droves
of 9001s bought by big customers for aggregation work.

We shall have to see, but I'm certainly an advocate of buying into
RSP880-RL and MOD200(-RL) instead of any Typhoon based gear, if you can.
It's been good advice since the MOD200 appeared, I think.

-- 
Tom