The brains of the CRS-3 322 terabits per second routing system were devised at Cisco Systems Development Center in Israel.
When, a few weeks ago, Cisco CEO John Chambers declared the company’s intention of launching a product that would “change the face of the Internet as we know it,” there were those in the Israeli high-tech industry who wondered whether this had any connection to the local market. There are several companies in Israel that aspire “to change the Internet”. They may not shout about it, but the managers of these companies claim discreetly that they have the capability to bring hundreds of megabits per second to every user, without substantial changes in the telecommunications network.
It turned out that what Chambers was talking about - the launch of the CRS-3 carrier routing system, with a capacity of 322 terabits per second, that will be core of the telephony service providers’ networks - had no connection to any Israeli companies. But it certainly has a connection to Cisco Israel. What enabled Chambers to make his portentous announcement was the team specializing in network processor development at the company’s development center in Netanya.
This capability on the part of Cisco Israel did not arise through an acquisition. It is part of the original activity that formed the basis for setting up the Cisco Systems Development Center in Israel in 1997, under Michael Laor. Since then, the center has mainly grown organically, apart from the acquisition of Seagull in 2000. Today, the center is 40 strong, and is headed by Alon Hurwitz, who is responsible for hardware development.
Hurwitz is convinced that “there is no other group in this field with capabilities that go to the edge technologically like these .”
The activity that Hurwitz manages comes under the Service Provider Routing Technology Group, one of Cisco’s strategic activity groups, responsible for sales to telecommunications service providers, meaning a quarter of Cisco’s total sales. The new router, the first customer for which will apparently be US telecommunications giant AT&T, is manly intended to handle video file transmission, which, according to Cisco, will represent 90% of all Internet traffic in 2013.
The component for which Hurwitz’s group is responsible is the NPU (network processing unit), which is the brain of the chipset that manages communications routing, and is called QuantumFlow. Alongside the work carried out by Cisco in Israel there are two other groups whose products complement the NPU on the chipset, located in Canada and in Silicon Valley.
The new router is capable of handling staggering amounts of information. According to Cisco, it can transfer the entire digital content of the Library of Congress in a second. This is achieved, Hurwitz says, through a new architecture that enables 256 processing units to work in parallel. He says this architecture will enable significant leaps forward to take place within just a few years. “We started development five years ago. It took us a long time to understand where the market was going and what trends we would want to provide an answer for.” The result is not just high speeds, but also greater integration of the various components, including memory, and reduced energy usage. The next upgrade, Horovitz estimates, will take less time. “From now on, we’ll be more aggressive,” he says.
The senior manager at the local center is currently Yoav Samet, who is responsible for business development in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) area, and Hurwitz is number two in the hierarchy. Hurwitz is cautious about the possibility of future growth of his team, but he has already recorded one clear achievement. Management of the development of future versions of the CRS-3 chipset will be from Israel, not from Silicon Valley as it has been up to now.
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