It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the online video boom is helping Cisco Systems sell a lot of its top-of-the-line CRS-1 routers.
The San Jose-based router and switch maker said that the total global cumulative shipments of CRS-1 Routers have doubled in less than nine months, rising from a total of 900 units shipped through June 2007 to more than 1,800 units shipped through March 2008. This shouldn’t come us a surprise. It was back in June 2007 that irst signs started to point to video (any kind of IP video) as the savior for Cisco.
CRS-1 was first introduced in May 2004, and since then has been adopted by many large carriers including Free.fr, Comcast, British Telecom and AT&T.
Cisco predicts that the Internet video traffic will be twenty times the traffic in 2006. They made a bold (and is somewhat self serving) claim that “in 2011, online video will generate 1 billion DVDs worth of traffic each month.” (Source: Cisco’s Global IP Traffic Forecast, 2008)
Even if you discount some of those numbers as corporate hyperbole, there is no denying that Cisco will continue to sell a lot of these mega million dollar monsters.
The consideration many people are not taking into account is that these are much longer lived flows than most networks are used to dealing with. Most of the flows rarely if ever got past their TCP Slow Start. Nowadays with these long lived video downloads, on-demand, YouTube-esque sites, etc we are seeing more and more flows get to their full bandwidth potential, maximizing the TCP Window size and lasting much, much longer.
This pretty much means the end of flow-cache switching systems that are not intelligent enough to pre-cache or use a topology derived caching system.
dg
Om, did you see “Network Commander Bates” in
http://tools.cisco.com/GCT/PCTPST/game_public/CiscoGameMCPLaunch.jsp
I am surprised it only doubled 😉