Cisco Enhances ASR 9000 with 10G and 100G Interfaces

Cisco rolled out a series of enhancements for its ASR 9000 series edge and aggregation routers with a new high-capacity chassis, new 10 GigE and 100 GigE interface cards, a virtualization technology for linking edge routers into a single management plane, and a content-caching service module.



Cisco noted that is ASR 9000 series has been deployed in over 500 Service Provider networks worldwide, giving it substantial base of customers ready to upgrade their edge routers.

With this rollout, the company is introducing two new members of the ASR 9000 family: the high-capacity ASR 9922 and the compact ASR 9000V. The ASR 9922 is designed to deliver application layer services quickly and reliably.


A key design criteria for the new platform was to increase scalability, and this is achieved with the ASR 9922's 20-slot chassis and the new high-density line cards. The first of these high-density line cards supports 24 full-rate 10 GigE ports in a single slot. Transport optimized and service optimized versions of this line card will be offered. The second card offers dual 100 GigE ports. Even at full line rate with small packets, it fully protected with redundant switching fabrics.



The new ASR 9000V is an access and aggregation router for the intelligent edge. Cisco is tying these edge routers together with a new technology that it is calling Cisco Network Virtualization (nV). This enables Service Providers to manage thousands of ASR 9000vs as though they were a single device, greatly simplifying network operations. The nV technology allows the ASR 9000v to operate as a "virtual distributed line card". Cisco said this enables it to scale to tens of thousands of Gigabit Ethernet ports under a single, managed ASR 9000 system.



Cisco is also introducing a distributed content caching card for the ASR 9000 series. This module combines compute capabilities with over 3 TB of solid state storage. The idea is store video content in the edge or aggregation router itself, closer to the viewer. Apart from video caching, the integrated service module could support a new generation of applications that require responsive content caching and advanced subscriber management.http://www.cisco.com