思科ASR 1000Series Routers: Service-Richness and Routing Innovation in a single package

历史上,表现在10到40Gbps with IP services has only been achieved using custom-designed ASICs. The advantage of that approach is that you can realize high performance and scale for which the ASIC was designed, whereas the tradeoff is that any substantial changes or support for new features/protocols may require respinning the ASIC, which is a lengthy process. Network processors, by design, provide the flexibility to support newer features over time, but have historically lacked the performance and scale to support the changing and growing needs of enterprise headend and SP applications. High-performance network processors usually require a fair bit of low-level (such as microcoding) programming language to introduce new features, which results in slowdown of feature introduction over time. Cisco QFP is the industry’s most advanced and most flexible networking silicon chipset, and features a 40-core chip, with each core running at 900 to 1200 MHz and able to perform almost all the IOS feature functionality, except for part of the QoS. QoS is offloaded to the other chip (the traffic manager) providing line-rate performance for functions such as shaping, queuing, and scheduling. This custom-designed network processor runs four threads on each packet-processing core, with support for the full IOS feature set, including NAT, IOS zone-based firewall, GRE, MPLS L2/L3 VPNs, NetFlow, and Web Cache Communication Protocol Version 2 (WCCPv2), to name a few. A centralized data-plane platform with true services integration results in a lot fewer touches through the silicon, making troubleshooting rather straightforward. QFP is really the fundamental silicon innovation behind Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers along with the carrier class routing software enabling ISSU/HA. The Cisco ASR 1000 series aggregation services routers are the Cisco next-generation, modular, service-rich routing platform designed with the flexibility to support 5- to 20- Gbps system bandwidth today , high performance, and scalability higher than any other comparable product. The overall system architecture is common across all types of supported chassis including ASR 1002-F, 1002, 1004, and 1006. From the perspective of changing network architectures, the ASR 1000 series has the potential to provide the consolidation needed to unify various applications, platforms, and functions into one single device: Convergence of features: The Cisco ASR 1000 allows for an extreme degree of feature and application integration by way of Cisco QuantumFlow Processor (QFP). This series of platform is geared for deploying various applications in both enterprise and service provider (SP) marketplaces. For an enterprise environment, these applications include traditional WAN aggregation, next-generation WANs, Internet gateways, and the secure headend; for the SP, the feature set includes the broadband and edge market segments. Convergence of platforms: The Cisco ASR 1000 bridges the gap in the Cisco routing portfolio between the Cisco 7200VXR and 7600 series routers, by addressing the 5-Gbps to 40-Gbps bandwidth requirements, along with services at those rates. Therefore, the convergence of various platforms is possible within a single device Convergence of network elements: You can also use the Cisco ASR 1000 to consolidate diverse feature requirements that are instead usually met via a mix of routers and appliances, such as firewalls, IPsec termination, an Internet peering edge, and WAN aggregation. Some other platforms integrate features similarly, but by way of multiple service adapters that take up I/O slots and introduce various data planes into a single routing platform. Such an integration results not only in complicated configuration and troubleshooting of the accelerated features, but it also leads to hidden costs in the form of procuring these modules over time. In today's world, Enterprise IT is going through a lot of fundamental changes (such as IaaS with a different set of requirements and scale), where both ease and scale of service creation and deployment are the most fundamental components that will define the true success of a routing platform and put to test its service richness for a given set of power, space and many other similar benchmarks!