Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Power in Routers and Switches (and Quite a Bit More) - BRKGRN-2161#
Cisco Live Europe 2025 (Amsterdam) digest Program Core pick Amsterdam · 9–14 February 2025
Speakers: LJ Wobker (Cisco), Lane Wigley (Cisco)
- Why: Power is becoming a first-order design constraint in physical DC networking (AI racks at 150kW+ make it unavoidable), and this is a systematic, test-data-backed treatment rather than a sustainability marketing talk. Wobker is a long-time hyperscale operator voice.
- What: A comprehensive grounding in power behavior of routers and switches: provisioning vs. typical vs. peak power; per-component breakdowns; how traffic, temperature, and other factors change draw; PSU efficiency and conversion loss; optics power; redundancy models; thermal limits in high-power systems; power modeling; and what actually saves power off-peak — with system-testing examples. (from abstract only)
- How: Walks from nameplate to real-world: how to model consumption from component-level data, where losses occur (PSU conversion, optics), how load and ambient temperature shift the curve, and quantifies which operational levers (e.g., idling ports, lower speeds) do and don't move the needle.
- Where applicable: Broadly applicable to any DC operator doing capacity planning, power budgeting, or sustainability reporting — the physics and methodology are vendor-neutral even if examples come from Cisco gear. Especially relevant alongside the AI-rack-power trends discussed elsewhere in this program.