DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN COMES CISCO'S NEW GOD-BOX

Cisco Systems ended the suspense last week over what two years and $500 million in development would produce by launching its next-generation Carrier Routing System.

The new system is extremely high capacity at up to 92 Tb/s and features a new operating system that Cisco CEO John Chambers said was designed from scratch.

“This is the biggest jump we have taken in innovation since the router was first introduced 20 years ago,” Chambers said at the introduction event.

Cisco claimes the multi-shelf architecture will give the product its longevity. Carriers can start with a 1.2 Tb/s system and add up to 72 line-card shelves for a total of 92 Tb/s. They also can add route-processing capacity as needed.

“I'm not talking about a router generation where every two to three years a new chassis comes out. Once we put this in place, we don't want to touch it for one to two decades,” Chambers said.

In addition to the 100-fold increase in capacity, the CRS-1 features the Silicon Packet Processor and a 40 Gb/s application-specific integrated circuit it developed with IBM. It also will deploy the industry's first OC-768c (40 Gb/s) packet interface.

Despite the leap in capacity, Cisco is touting the fact that it took a system approach in designing CRS-1 — along with input from MCI, Sprint and T-Com — rather than the more traditional product approach. The system approach is enabled by Cisco's new IOS XR Software, which was designed for terabit-scale routing systems built on distributed multi-shelf architectures.

“We built the first true telco-grade operating system,” said Mike Volpi, Cisco's senior vice president and general manager.

Volpi added that as in all technologically advanced markets, commoditization has set in for telecom, and carriers need to transform their businesses to create the next generation of growth and profitability. “To do that you have to build a next-generation infrastructure flexible enough to transport the future set of services,” he said.

At the core of that infrastructure are the CRS-1 and its associated software, IOS XR.

IOS XR features a new management interface, XML-based Craft Works Interface that can manage single or multiple shelf systems. It also is what helps Cisco achieve the other imperatives of its design: continuous system operation during expansion, maintenance and upgrades, as well as service flexibility, which allows service providers to offer multiple services on the same network by separating the traffic and network operations on a per-service or per-customer basis.

Chambers promised a two-fold increase in innovation from Cisco over the next 12 months compared with previous years. Analysts and competitors say they'll need it.

“This move by Cisco is not expected to lead to a major revolution, but it's a necessary evolutionary step,” said Mark Main, senior analyst at Ovum.

Hudson Gilmer, senior product marketing manager for Cisco competitor Avici Systems, said the product is overkill for 99% of carriers. “Avici scalability goes two orders of magnitude beyond what carriers need today, and that's enough,” Gilmer said.

Gilmer said Avici has the technology to roll out a 40 Gb/s line card, but that no one is asking for it. Avici is focused on delivering 10 Gb/s, which it says is the sweet spot.

Chambers is thinking bigger. “If you look back at predictions made in terms of capacity, [the industry] has constantly misestimated how quickly [increased demand] would occur if we provided the technology to make it occur,” Chambers said.

The carrier partners that provided input during Cisco's development process don't think it's overkill. The CRS-1 is in trials with six carriers. Sprint's Kathy Walker, executive vice president of network services, said that Sprint has “described an intent to purchase.”

MCI's Jack Wimmer, vice president of network architecture and advanced technology, said that while reliability was at the top of his priority list when it comes to building networks, “such scalability is important to be able to grow the network in time to meet the demands of our customers.”

In conjunction with Cisco's announcement, MCI demonstrated a 40 Gb/s IP connection over its optical network between points of presence located in San Francisco and San Jose, Calif. The demonstration carried the traffic over the single full-duplex OC-768c interface of Cisco's CRS-1. It also used StrataLight's OTS-4000 Optical Terminal Subsystem.

During the announcement, Cisco stressed its CRS-1 by maintaining a HDTV video link with MCI's Wimmer in San Francisco and adding 4000 iPods downloading music (using a traffic generator from Agilent Technologies), 12,000 gamers, 200 televisions using up to 6 Mb/s streams with another 2500 simulated televisions, 1000 Cisco 7970 IP phones and 1 million Web browsers. No discernable degradation was apparent in the videoconference.

The CRS-1 will be generally available in July.