Cisco readies upgrade for 10000 series

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: OPTICAL NETWORKING
07/06/05

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* Cisco's 10000 series router
* Links related to Optical Networking
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: Cisco readies upgrade for 10000 series

By Jim Duffy

Cisco does not plan to match Juniper's recent broadband remote
access server bandwidth volley when it unveils upgrades to its
10000 series aggregation router later this year.

Cisco is expected to roll out the next generation of its 10000
series platform, which will include enhanced broadband
aggregation features and increased capacity as well as software
upgrades to provide a common release cycle to better align the
router's leased-line and broadband aggregation features. The
10000 series currently supports 60,000 to 64,000 sessions with a
second-generation Performance Routing Engine (PRE-2) that
processes 6.2 million packet/sec.

Broadband remote access server (B-RAS) routers are in high
demand among service providers looking to provide packetized
voice, data and video "triple play" services to businesses and
consumers. Cisco's 10000 series router is one such B-RAS, as are
Juniper's new E320, Laurel Networks' ST 200 and ST 50 platforms,
Riverstone's 15000 and RS systems, and Alcatel's 7750 and 7450
routers.

Cisco's competitors believe the next-generation 10000 will have
a PRE-3 that provides 10 million packet/sec of performance as
well as software that provides hitless failover for increased
uptime. Hitless failover provides continuous packet forwarding
even when a primary controller is failing and backing up to a
secondary one.

Mike Volpi, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's
Routing Technology group, would not confirm this, but did
mention that the next release would boost subscriber support
beyond 64,000 sessions and that the broadband aggregation
software features of the 10000 would find their way to other
Cisco platforms.

"Anything that runs IOS, so long as it has the appropriate
hardware support, can run the broadband aggregation software,"
Volpi says. "We will be releasing new versions of the broadband
aggregation software that has a richer set of features. But we
haven't specified time frames or what additional features."

He says the 10000 series will not approach the throughput
numbers introduced earlier this month by Juniper's E320. The
E320 supports 320G bit/sec of bandwidth and 128,000 subscribers,
while the backplane capacity of the eight-slot 10008 router is
51.2G bit/sec.

"We don't quite see the market developing that way," Volpi says
of the E320. "If you look at their product, it is at the
crossroads between metro Ethernet aggregation... and it also has
the design of being a very large broadband remote access server.
If you look at how triple play evolves, it doesn't make a huge
amount of sense to feed all of the video through the broadband
remote access server. [The 10000 is] not designed to be in the
path of all the video traffic."

Instead, Cisco proposes a two-box approach in which video would
be handled by a metropolitan Ethernet aggregation router such as
Cisco's 7600 series systems, Volpi says. The traffic that needs
to go through the B-RAS for the high packet manipulation of
subscriber service processing gets parsed off at the 7600 and
fed through the B-RAS.

"The better way to do it is to let your low-cost Ethernet
transport do the heavy lifting of packets and then only feed to
the [broadband remote access server] the traffic that needs to
go there," he says.

The 10000 series will see an increase in the number of users and
sessions supported, but not in the total bandwidth of the
system, according to Cisco.

"This notion of a big honkin' centralized [broadband remote
access server] is not architecturally the right approach," Volpi
says. "We don't think you have to feed all of that video traffic
through it so it doesn't quite make sense for us to scale the
throughput to that level" of the E320.
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Jim Duffy

Jim Duffy is managing editor of Network World's service provider
equipment coverage
<http://www.networkworld.com/topics/service-providers.html>. He
has 18 years of high-tech reporting experience, including over
12 years at Network World. Previously, he was senior editor at
Computer Systems News and associate editor/reporter at
Electronic News and MIS Week. He can be reached at
<mailto:jduffy@nww.com>.
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by DuPont
Limiting the Plenum Cable Fire Risks

Concerns are rising about the growing number of combustible
cables present in commercial buildings required to service the
ever-increasing demands of IT networks. More workstations are
taxing our infrastructure. These concerns are the thrust behind
new "limited combustible" cables that reduces fire safety risk.
Learn more by reading this white paper now.
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=107795
_______________________________________________________________
ARCHIVE LINKS

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solutions will soon be available. Click here:
<http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/062005-data-recovery.html>
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