Cisco 8608 Router Chassis

Large, distributed chassis have traditionally been designed to cater to the market requirement for total system bandwidth, port diversity, and redundancy. The requirements far exceeded what could be accomplished with a single NPU. The fabrics that weave together multi-NPU systems had to be provisioned to the highest bandwidth use case and deployed 100% upfront, consuming power and capital regardless of the number of installed line cards. That wisdom held true for multiple generations of core, edge, and aggregation distributed systems.

Now with the advent of dense Cisco Silicon One ASICs, we can address these roles with a new breed of centralized architectures that combine the best aspects of distributed and fixed systems. Cisco 8608 has combined the redundancy and I/O diversity of distributed systems with the economics and simple elegance of fixed platforms. As a result, Cisco 8608 delivers redundancy at an optimized cost while enabling flexibility and expandability through generational continuity. The key chassis components and their overview is captured in the table below: