Abstract

Tolly Group Report #202128 (May 2002) documents Redback’s SmartEdge 800 Router delivering edge-aggregation services at carrier scale.

• Wire-speed forwarding with policy enabled. In a chassis loaded with two OC-48 uplinks and ten channelized T3 cards (3,360 DS1 circuits) the router forwarded traffic at full line rate while 3,360 ACLs and 2,000 QoS rules were active, with zero packet loss.

• Subscriber scale. Tests proved support for 32,000 virtual interfaces comprising 8,000 frame-relay PVCs, 16,000 ATM PVCs, and 8,000 VLANs, all driven at line rate without loss.

• VPN capacity. The platform upheld traffic across 2,000 MPLS VPNs carrying 750,000 total routes at 80% of line rate with no packet loss.

• Multicast replication. Engineers replicated a single multicast stream to 16,380 subscribers over 36 Gigabit Ethernet ports, sustaining aggregate throughput of 33 Gb/s with no drops.

Take-away: SmartEdge 800 combines wire-speed ACL and QoS enforcement, 32,000-interface density, large MPLS VPN and route tables, and sixteen-thousand-plus multicast fan-out while maintaining zero packet loss, making it a strong choice for service-provider edge aggregation where scale and policy performance are critical.