Cisco CRS-3 Adds Packet Transport Blades, Customer Traction

In its first year, the Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing System has racked up 80 customers, putting it on a faster adoption pace than the original CRS-1 platform.



Cisco is now adding new capabilities to the CRS-3 platform, expanding its addressable market while reducing the cost for service providers to deliver packet-transport services.



Flexible Packet Transport -- the Cisco CRS-3 flexible packet-transport capability is a form of label switching enabled with the addition of a blade to the Cisco CRS platform. Packet-transport expands broadens the platform's reach into new markets while protecting service providers' current investments in the core. It also complements the Cisco Carrier-Grade IPv6 functionality and data center capabilities like Network Positioning System (NPS), cloud VPN, and classical Internet Protocol/Multiprotocol Label Switching routing.



Significant Savings -- because the flexible packet-transport capability does not require a new standalone product to be deployed in a network, operators can add the capability to existing CRS-3 networks without expensive, time-consuming qualification testing. Competitive solutions require three platforms to deliver the same functionality as the Cisco CRS-3, which lowers the total cost of ownership for capital expenses by over 40 percent.



Both AT&T and Comcast have now deployed the CRS-3 with 100 Gbps interfaces in production networks.



Another interesting note -- to date, Cisco has shipped 7.5 petabits per second of core bandwidth capacity to CRS platform worldwide, enough core bandwidth to support a basic video conference call with every person on earth simultaneously.http://www.cisco.com