Welcome to Carrier Grade
My last post summerized the history of the Adtaq network while reflecting on some memorable occasions and milestones. The conclusion left folks wondering what the ‘graduation’ may have meant and I’m back now (finally!) to pull that rabbit out of the hat.
The Adtaq network is now powered by a Cisco Systems Catalyst 6509 Carrier Switch, equipped with a Supervisor 720 3BXL. This switch has 9 slots available for modular upgrades with 3 presently occupied; the Supervisor itself, a 16 port GBIC blade, and a 48 port 10/100 blade.
The device supports 10 Gig blades as well, allowing us to scale well beyond our current size without skipping a beat (bit?).
The scalability of this device is staggering. This is the same configuration which companies such as ATT, Verizon and Qwest use to deliver their bandwidth to customers; we are certainly in good company.
Customers, enjoy the continued high performance! Everyone else, what are you waiting for?!
April 2nd, 2008 at 5:41 pm
So just 1 Cat 6509? Wouldn’t you need to deploy two of these at least for true carrier grade?
It also sounds like you only have 1 sup 720 in the chassis?
Generally, I assume about $250k for a single 6509 with dual redundany sup720’s and the rest of the slots filled with triple speed 48 port blades. Get a second one of those and truly you have arrived with over 600 ports at your disposal
If anyone knows how costly this big iron is its me, so I don’t mean to steal the wind from your sails.
Even just one 6509 is a tremendous accomplishment for a datacenter startup. Congrats!
Not only that it allows you to be the cheapest per U in town since you dont have to offset the cost of half a million in fully redundant 6509’s.
So do you have the 10Gig links feeding directly into the 6509 or have you got a couple of the old routers doing that for the 6509?
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Yeah, at this point it’s just one unit. We do have another SUP720 but it isn’t currently installed as we are working on some super secret plans for the additional 6509 we’ll be deploying… More on that soon!
As far as whether or not that’s carrier grade, I know that all of the carriers I’ve ordered from have provided just one uplink and that one uplink has never gone down. While redundancy is always a big bonus, I also think that with proper design and planning a single uplink can provide the five nines everyone is looking for. Would I expect that sort of performance from a discount carrier? No… But then again I wouldn’t purchase from a discount carrier.
With most of our customers now over in the Issaquah datacenter, our 6509 is mostly fiber interfaces at this point. We’re trying to get the word out to folks in the Westin as well as Fisher Plaza and the Intergate campuses down south that we’ve got a pretty nice bandwidth product here and can sell at wholesale rates.
Our uplinks to Issaquah are actually lit service from Time Warner Telecom and yes, they terminate directly on the 6509.