Cisco 8202 Chassis w 12 x 400GE

The Cisco 8200 Series design yields unprecedented power efficiency. To achieve equivalent routed bandwidth and scale, other routers require multiple devices such as off-chip Ternary Content-Addressable Memory (TCAMs) and fabric ASICs. The 8200 Series footprints allow them to be deployed in locations that traditionally required much larger chassis and special accommodations for power and cooling. Provisioning 10.8 Tbps in the most efficient 100G-generation chassis requires over seven times the space and four times the power. While SoC systems fit into the 1 RU footprint, their lack of buffering, smaller feature set, and low scale constrain their ability to serve in many provider and Data Center Interconnect (DCI) roles. For example, traditional SoC devices provide only low hundreds of microseconds of buffering - limiting their suitability for traffic flows without very low round-trip times. In contrast, the 8200 Series provides tens of milliseconds of buffering and supports large forwarding tables. The ability to deploy a full-featured router into power- and space-constrained facilities such as colocation, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), or older central office sites opens new possibilities for network designs.