Huawei unveiled the industry's first and highest-capacity 480 Gbps router line card, enabling a capacity of 15.4 Tbps for its high-end core router with 48x10GE, 12x40GE, or 4x100GE line-rate forwarding per slot. Huawei will offer various daughter cards with 10GE/40GE/100GE ports for flexible configuration.
Huawei said the capacity is achieved using its third-generation programmable, custom Solar 3.0 ASICs with Smart Memory and Intelligent Frequency Adjustment (IFA) technologies. The company said it is able to achieve a record-low energy use of 0.71 W/g for the line card.
"The global 100G era is coming, with Internet traffic fast approaching terabyte level. 2012 marks the beginning of large-scale commercial deployment of 100G, with the launch of Huawei's 480G line card expected to accelerate the development of the high-end 100G industry. It will help carriers build sustainable and efficient networks, combat the bandwidth challenges created by cloud application proliferation, and reduce network O&M costs." said Gai Gang, President of Huawei's Carrier IP Product Line.
- Earlier this month, Huawei announced Software Defined Network (SDN) capabilities on its Service Provider routers. The company said its SDN solution is based on its high-performance, large-capacity hardware platform and fully distributed "VRP" software, which enables a centralized control plane and a software-defined forwarding plane.
Huawei will support Openflow for decoupling of hardware and software. By abstracting the control layer and the orchestration layer, Huawei said its SDN Enabled router enables carriers to rapidly deploy new services without having to change the forwarding hardware. Another advantage of SDN, according to Huawei, is that end-to-end path calculation based on routing policies is possible with a centralized controller. The SDN Enabled router is also expected to simplify IP network management.
