Cisco’s long-haul routing solution

Cisco Systems introduced a new god-box this week in the form of the CRS-1 Carrier Routing System. The extremely high-capacity core routing system represents Cisco’s bid to support the core of carriers’ converged networks for at least the next decade.

While the system boasts up to 92 Tbps capacity and the industry’s first OC-768c packet interface, Cisco is touting its system approach rather than product approach to the design of the CRS. The system approach is enabled by Cisco’s IOS XR Software, which was designed for terabit-scale routing systems built on distributed multi-shelf architectures.

"No matter how big you build an individual element, engineering the network is still complex," said Tony Bates, vice president and general manager of the Routing Technology Group at Cisco. "But with CRS you can have a single router instance that takes away a lot of the management, control plane policy and traffic engineering complexity."

The routing system features a 40-Gbps application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) known as the Cisco Silicon Packet Processor (SPP) and an XML-based management tool for single or multi-shelf systems.

Cisco is in trials or discussions with six carriers including Sprint, MCI and BT. Sprint’s Kathy Walker, executive vice president of network services, said in a statement that Sprint provided insight for the design of the CRS-1 system and has "described an intent to purchase."

The system will become generally available in July. It is designed to provide continuous system operation that permits maintenance, upgrades and expansion without system interruption. A new memory-protected, microkernel-based operating system enables this continuous operation by separating the control, data and management planes of the system.

Two other primary goals in the system’s design are service flexibility and system longevity. Cisco used its Intelligent ServiceFlex design to combine the SPP and IOS XR software so that carriers can consolidate multiple networks onto a single infrastructure to accelerate service delivery.

The system’s longevity is hoped to come from a modular design that lets carriers scale from 1.2 Tbps to 92 Tbps simply by adding shelves.

"Once we put a system in, we don’t want to touch it for one or two decades," said John Chambers, CEO of Cisco.