Cisco offers low end version of CRS-1 core router

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 06 September 2006 02:14

Business IT - Technology

Cisco has introduced a four slot version of its flagship core router saying the new product, starting at $US160,000, will be economic to deploy in regional PoPs, MSO hub locations and  data centre peering sites.
The new product with 320Gbps throughput complements the existing 16 slot version with a throughput of 1.2tbps and the eight slot version. Cisco has a number of customers for the current versions but has named US carrier Sprint as the first customer of the new product. "Sprint has been evaluating the CRS-1 since 2004 and will deploy it beginning in CYQ4 2006," the company said. "The new four-slot chassis will enable Sprint to deploy 40Gbps routing more broadly and at a lower cost."

Iyad Tarazi, vice president of network development for  Sprint said: "By creating a smaller form factor for the CRS-1 platform, Cisco is enabling us to lower costs and more efficiently handle the convergence of voice, video, data and mobility services, while still gaining the scalability, reliability and service flexibility that the platform provides." (Sprint has just launched the first pay-per-view service of full length movies to its cellphone customers)

Existing CRS-1 user National LambdaRail, a consortium of US research universities and private sector technology companies is evaluating the new four-slot platform.

The CRS-1, launched in 2004, was billed as the fruit of a four-year $US500 million R&D programme and the culmination of the most ambitious project in Cisco's 20-year history. The current 1.2tbps product is only entry-level in terms of throughput - The CRS-1 is designed to scale up to 92tbps - which would be sufficient capacity to route all the world's telephony traffic.
 
Other publicly announced CRS-1 customers include BT, Cable & Wireless, Comcast, China Telecom (ChinaNet), China Education and Research Network (CERNET), KT (formerly Korea Telecom), the National Institute of Informatics' SuperSINET research network in Japan, MTS Allstream, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, SaskTel, Softbank Yahoo! BB, Strato Medien AG, Swisscom, Shanghai Telecom, Telstra and VTR.

Cisco has also just announced that  KT, Korea's largest telco has selected the CRS-1 for its Kornet backbone network.

According to Cisco, BT has verified the functionality of the Cisco CRS-1 for broadcast TV, video-on-demand and core applications. In the test, conducted in July of this year, three secure domain routers (SDRs) were established in-service on a single CRS-1 multi-chassis system.

"The test showed support for 400,000 simultaneous unique multicast streams, and support for priority queuing and traffic shaping, protecting important digital video or VoIP traffic from increases in latency and packet loss caused by oversubscription in lower traffic classes," Cisco said.

"The CRS-1 was capable of creating new SDRs in-service without affecting the operation of any other SDR, demonstrating an ability to run multiple instances on a single routing system without interference or failure." It claimed that This reliability and availability is critical to digital video and IPTV delivery.

"The four-slot single chassis CRS-1 was evaluated for multicast performance utilising a 10GigE IP over dense wavelength division multiplexing (IPoDWDM) interconnect, and was found to be comparable in performance to the CRS-1 multi-chassis route."