r/cableporn 15d ago

A buildout I recently finished

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u/m_vc 15d ago

Is the spine visible in the photos shown? Cant really see a difference between the switches

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u/drazzeler 15d ago

No problem! The switches at the top are the edge routers; 7280QR-C36's. The switches in the middle are the spines; 7050QX-32S'. The switches at the bottom are the access switches, also 7050QX-32S'.

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u/m_vc 15d ago edited 15d ago

Thank you. What do the edge routers do?

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u/drazzeler 14d ago

External connections from mostly transit providers plug in to these. Transit providers send us a table of all of the routes they know about. We aggregate those tables into one single table based on what the best (shortest) paths to the destination are. Because these tables can grow quite large (~1M for IPv4, ~400k for IPv6), you need a special device that can install all of them into a hardware ASIC.