New Cisco ASR 9000
November 11, 2008Today, 11-11-08, Cisco unveiled the new Cisco ASR 9000 series routers:
ASR-9000
The ASR 9000 builds on the ASR series and QuantumFlow processor announced earlier this year. It cost $200 million and was in development for more than four years. The box runs Cisco’s IOS-XR operating system with edge-specific enhancements, and is expected to succeed the company’s eight-year-old and widely installed 7600 series systems.
ASR 9000 is designed for a subscriber and enterprise world of increasing video and mobile service use. According to Cisco, IP traffic over wireline and mobile networks will nearly double every two years until 2012, reaching 522 exabytes — an exabyte is a billion gigabytes – or the equivalent of downloading 125 billion DVD movies per month.
The ASR 9000 comes in six- and 10-slot configurations and Cisco says they support 400Gbps per slot.
At 6.4Tbps across the backplane, Cisco says the ASR 9000 provide six times the capacity of competitive edge routers, which include Juniper’s MX960, Alcatel-Lucent’s 7750 and Ericsson’s Redback SM 480.
The Cisco ASR 9000 is in trial with service provider Softbank in Japan, and with Tier 1 service providers based in the North America and Europe regions. It will be available in the first quarter of 2009.
