At Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, Huawei unveiled what it believes to be the industry's first 4T router line card – that’s four terabits – delivering the industry's highest density 100 Gigabit Ethernet interface interconnection.
The line cards will boost the capacity of Huawei's NetEngine9000 series core router (NE9000), which currently supports 80Tb/s in a single chassis (and petabit capacity in a multi-chassis configuration), expandable in the future to 160Tb/s in a single chassis.
Using the new line cards, the NE9000 can support two million concurrent online users streaming 4K videos, thereby satisfying customer network bandwidth requirements for the next five to ten years and protecting operators’ network investments.
The line cards for the NE9000 are part of Huawei's CloudBackbone portfolio, which enables higher capacity and efficiency for core nodes and data centre interconnection (DCI). This will help operators address data flow challenges in the cloud era, as traffic between data centres becomes more complex and dynamic, and networks need to support on-demand changes.
Huawei’s new 4T router line cards use the company’s internally developed Solar5.0 network processing chip design to realise duplex rate line forwarding from all interfaces. 10, 40, 100 and 400GbE interfaces are supported; this allows operators to implement end-to-end 400GbE links with transport devices, simplifying network topology and improving data transmission efficiency.
In addition, the NE9000 uses energy-saving technologies with a single device only consuming 0.4W per Gb/s, just half of that of competitor products, Huawei claims. Therefore, the NE9000 is able to effectively meet backbone network device energy efficiency requirements in the cloud era.
Gai Gang, president of Huawei's router and carrier IP product line, said: “Huawei's 4T router line cards make the NE9000 the most integrated in the industry, allowing operators to effectively meet requirements for capacity and flexible cloud service bearing. Moving forward, Huawei will further accelerate innovation into advanced routing technology, and continue to help operators achieve long-term, sustainable network development and business success in the cloud era.”