Cisco Gets Edge-y
Cisco debuts Aggregation Services Routers to combat appliance sprawl and edge services.
After toiling for over five years and investing $250 million into the project, Cisco this took the wraps off its ASR 1000 routers tailored for enterprises and service providers.
These new Aggregation Services Routers feature a new programmable QuantumFlow processor that together with IOS XE software provides a virtualized platform on which to layer a range of services at speeds of up to 10 Gbps. The company is also taking the opportunity to point out how consolidating network functionality onto an ASR is a greener move overall.
By eliminating those appliances (and their power and cooling requirements) and deploying an ASR 1000, Cisco and Synergy Research concluded that organizations could cut their carbon footprint by the equivalent of over 3,700 gallons of gas.
Cisco is courting service providers with the ability to handle and quickly provision hosted or managed services. For enterprises, collaboration, application performance, security and WAN aggregation are the main draws.
According to the company, the routers are capable of concurrently providing network functionality usually relegated to appliances and stand-alone servers. These can include application optimization, voice and video, and security services such as encryption, firewalls, IPSec VPNs and deep-packet inspection.
Additionally, in-service software upgrades give network administrators the option to add and upgrade services without router downtime.
Three models will go on sale in April, the 2U form factor ASR 1002 with 3 shared port adapter (SPA) slots, 4U 1004 with 8 SPA slots, and 6U 1006 with 12 SPA slots. Prices start at $35,000.
Article courtesy of Enterprise IT Planet
