Cisco unveils compact new edge router

Cisco’s ASR 1000 built on its own chips

Cisco Systems today unveiled a new edge router powered by its own silicon designs, trumpeting the new product’s compact form factor and built-in functionality.

The new Aggregation Services Router 1000, available starting next month at a list price of $35,000 each, comes in 2-, 4- and 6-rack unit sizes and can support 5-, 10-, 20- and eventually 40-Gb/s interfaces. In terms of performance, said Suraj Shetty, Cisco’s senior director of worldwide service provider marketing, the new router is equivalent to 160 of Cisco’s popular 7200s.

“The ASR…fits a nice niche on the provider edge as well as for high-speed managed services,” said IDC analyst Eve Griliches, in a research note. “This product line is clearly more full-featured and higher functioning than the 7200, 7300, and 7500 product lines, all of which sold into service provider and enterprise networks. And while the 7200–7500 product lines were used mostly for Internet connectivity, the ASR series, with new form factors that are compact and efficient, supplies a host of IP services the previous lines did not.”

The ASR 1000 gets its power from a new processor developed in-house by Cisco over the past five years. The “Quantum Flow” processor includes two chips: a packet processor and a traffic management chip that can manage multiple quality-of-service tiers. The processor also includes functions for which competing systems require separate appliances, such as session border control and deep packet inspection.

That integration requires less power and cooling than equivalent routing systems based on separate appliances, said Ray Mota, Synergy Research analyst.

Broadband subscriber management will be a key application for the new router, Griliches said. There the ASR will likely receive traffic over 10 Gb/s Ethernet links from layer-two switches that are themselves aggregating traffic from DSLAMs downstream. Beginning this month, Japan’s NTT is deploying the largest version of the ASR to handle IPTV, video-on-demand and Ipv6 broadcasting, Cisco said.

Though the ASR is the first product Cisco has announced to include the Quantum Flow processor, it is likely not the last, said Griliches, who expects more new edge routers from Cisco in the near future.

According to Ovum-RHK, Cisco dominated the IP/MPLS edge market last year with 48% of the market, trailed by Alcatel-Lucent with 19% and Juniper Networks with 15%.