CRS-1 8-slot physicals

Following a question from Richard about the 8-slot version of the CRS-1, here’s some of what I gleaned last week.

As you may know, the Carrier Routing System 1 (CRS-1) comes in a 16 slot, 8 slot and 4 slot format.  Currently only the 16-slot ones can be can be chained together to become the kind of super-node that I wrote about in my previous post.  The 16-slot one is pretty massive though, so may people on the course seemed to be about to put 8-slot variants in for their customers.

Cisco CRS-1 Rack and Stack

I’m just on a Cisco CRS-1 Essentials course this week, which has been pretty interesting all round We had a peek inside their NGN test-lab at 300 Longwater Avenue this afternoon for a look at the physicals of the box itself, and man – it’s a beast.

For a start, they recommend you need three people for two days to install this thing (the 16-slot version). It comes in so many boxes you wouldn’t believe, so for a start you need to plan where it’s all going to go while you get the chassis inside.

The chassis itself can weigh 1800 pounds in total, so you need to re-inforce the floor all the way to its final resting place. You also need to make sure the thing will fit through all the doors – it seems to be about 7 feet high, and you don’t want to be tipping something like that over to get it in a lift.