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Network Infrastructure

Cisco Systems Routers

Cisco Systems ASR 1000 Series Routers

DataVox customers are increasingly deploying integrated services routers, or sophisticated network routers that can deliver voice, video, data and Internet access, wireless, and other applications.

Cisco® is reinventing edge routing with the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers, a new line of midrange routers that establish a new price-to-performance class offering, benefiting both service providers and enterprises alike:

For service providers, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers facilitate more flexible, efficient, and cost-effective delivery of complex consumer and business services.
For enterprises, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers deliver a highly reliable, high-performance WAN edge solution where information, communication, collaboration, and commerce converge.

The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers:

Accelerate services by offering outstanding performance and resiliency with optimized, intelligent services
Establish a new benchmark for price-to-performance offerings in the enterprise advanced routing, service provider edge, and broadband aggregation segments
Facilitate significant network architectural innovations in areas such as WAN aggregation, managed customer-premises-equipment (CPE) services, service provider edge services, etc.
Reduce operating expenses (OpEx) and capital expenditures (CapEx) by facilitating managed or hosted services over identical architectures and operating environments

Product Overview

The Cisco ASR 1000 Series consists of three different versions (Figure 1): the Cisco ASR 1002 Router, the Cisco ASR 1004 Router, and the Cisco ASR 1006 Router. All three models use the new innovative and powerful Cisco QuantumFlow Processor which provides a huge leap in performance and resiliency for network processors.

Figure 1. Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers

Cisco ASR 1000 Routers

The Cisco ASR 1000 Series provides a significant enhanced value compared to prior generations of Cisco midrange routing solutions by providing more than tenfold performance improvement with services running. Additionally, the routers have hardware and software redundancy, as well as an industry-leading high-availability design.

The Cisco ASR 1000 Series delivers multiple services embedded in the Cisco QuantumFlow Processor at wire speeds of up to 10 Gbps. The services supported on the Cisco Packet QuantumFlow Processor include security services (for example, encryption and firewall), quality of service (QoS), Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR), Cisco IOS® Flexible Packet Matching, broadband aggregation, and session border controller, among others.

With the separation of the control and data planes in the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router architecture, software redundancy (on the Cisco ASR 1002 and 1004 models) and hardware redundancy (on the Cisco ASR 1006 Router) are provided. Additionally, the modular Cisco IOS XE Software that is introduced with the Cisco ASR 1000 Series facilitates In Service Software Upgrade (ISSU).

From a price-to-performance perspective, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router solution fits well between the Cisco 7200 and Cisco 7300 Series and the Cisco 7600 and Cisco Catalyst® 6000 Series Routers, thus dramatically enhancing the Cisco midrange routing portfolio (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Cisco Midrange Routing Portfolio

Cisco Midrange Routers

Table 1. Cisco ASR 1000 Series Enterprise Applications

Applications
Application	Benefits	Implementations
Superior application availability at the WAN edge: Guarantee high-priority applications by creating a virtual “glass ceiling” for lower-priority applications.	Applies MQC policies on VLANs or tunnels Clamps an arbitrary collection of low-priority traffic to a certain bandwidth Classifies based on differentiated services code point (DSCP), NBAR, and Cisco IOS Flexible Packet Matching (FPM) into numerous hierarchies, (one for high priority and one for low priority)	Implements flexible hierarchies Supports 128,000 queues All queues can have a minimum, maximum, and excess bandwidth with priority propagation.
Multiservice, scalable, and secure headend: The Cisco ASR 1000 Series offers full-service IP Security (IPsec) VPN aggregation that scales to meet the new bandwidth demands of service provider IP VPNs.	Reduces CapEx and OpEx by migrating and consolidating to fewer Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers Protects investment through easy transition to much higher encryption support – offering an encryption support of up to 3.5 Gbps with the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Embedded Services Processor (ASR1000-ESP10) Offers easier management through embedded security services in Cisco Packet Processor, with no additional service modules or blades required Optimized for QoS and IP Multicast applications	Supports thousands of sites Supports 6000 tunnels Offers 3.5-Gbps encryption performance and 6.5-Gbps non-cryptographic throughput support Offers 2 Mpps with all baseline services combined and encryption enabled
Embedded high-speed firewall: With the Zone-Policy Firewall, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series acts as an implicit complete barrier between any interfaces not members of the same zone. An explicit zone-pair policy must be specified (using Cisco Policy Language; that is, Modular QoS CLI [MQC]) in each direction between each zone pair. The policy establishes within the router what kind of stateful inspection (Layer 4, Layer 7, or application) and session parameters to apply to each zone pairing. Example: An explicit policy allowing HTTP and Domain Name System (DNS) to traverse the Internet-DMZ zone	The firewall is embedded in the Cisco Packet Processor; no additional service blades or modules are required. Multigigabits of bandwidth are routed while at the same time the router performs Zone-Policy Firewall and other baseline features such as QoS, IPv4, IPv6, NetFlow, etc. The Cisco ASR 1000 Series provides logging of all firewall session state off to network-management applications capable of accepting relatively huge amounts of flow data. Third-party applications can handle the session data.	Provides firewall performance of 5 to 10 Gbps at time of first availability, depending on the embedded services processor Offers high-speed logging of 40,000 sessions per second with NetFlow Version 9 Supports throughput of 2 million packets per second (Mpps) with numerous services and firewall enablement combined
Managed CPE: This implementation of branch architecture offers powerful investment protection with services and scale.	Helps branch office route correctly over various types of Ethernet service-level agreements (SLAs) Encrypts multigigabits of bandwidth – without any additional service blades or modules Optimizes the WAN to route around brownouts in the service provider network to further guarantee mission-critical applications Offers a small form factor (2 rack units [2RU]) with the Cisco ASR 1002 Router, including software modularity and ISSU Offers accessibility even when	Offers first-in-industry software redundancy support, without any additional hardware module Powerful firewall and NAT performance of 5 to 10 Gbps and 1.5 - to 3.5-Gbps encryption support in addition to WAN optimization and voice features

Table 2. Cisco ASR 1000 Series Service Provider Applications

Applications
Application	Benefits	Implementations
Broadband L2TP access concentrator (LAC) or L2TP Network Server (LNS): Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) endpoint to tunnel Point-to-Point Protocol (PPPoX) or IP sessions with bandwidth demands in the STM-1 ATM, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet range	Ideal for triple-play (data, voice, and video) wholesale deployments Offers integral service delivery Offers per-user firewall, flexible packet matching, NBAR, SBC, etc.	Provides very high scalability of up to 32,000 subscribers and up to 16,000 tunnels
Service provider edge: Layer 3 VPN (L3VPN) provider edge: Example: Distributed provider edge, or provider edge in global VPN networks for bandwidth demands such as asymmetric DSL (ADSL), T1/E1, STM-1, STM-4, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, etc.	Provides integral services in Cisco Packet Processor: Encryption, Flexible Packet Matching, NBAR, SBC, IP Multicast, etc.	Offers excellent multicast performance Scales to 4000 Virtual Route Forwarding (VRF) instances, 1 million Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) labels, and 16,000 access control lists (ACLs) Supports up to 1 million IPv4 routes Supports up to 250,000 IPv6 routes
Service provider edge: High-end route reflector: As a route reflector for bandwidth support of 10 Gbps	Provides high scalability Offers modular design of route processor and embedded services processor with hardware and software redundancy	Scales up to 1 million IPv4 routes or 250,000 IPv6 routes Supports 64,000 Layer 3 adjacencies Offers sufficient memory (2-GB DRAM) Offers optional upgrade to 4-GB DRAM Note: The Cisco ASR 1002 Router ships by default with 4-GB DRAM (ASR1002) Offers extensive Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) feature support
Next-generation voice and multimedia example: Cisco Session Border Controller (SBC): The SBC implementation performs the voice and video gateway functions simultaneously with regular IP data services. No appliance or additional service blade is required. The control protocols and media protocols work transparently within a complex voice architecture.	The WAN edge is simpler to manage because only one egress and one ingress point needs management and policy application. With the distributed control plane and separate data-forwarding plane, the signaling and control processing remain separate from media processing. ISSU support allows for easy addition of new-use cases. A single SBC application on the Cisco ASR 1000 Series can be used for residential, enterprise, and service provider peering applications.	Facilitates SBC with security, QoS, IPv4, and IPv6 (IP Unicast and IP Multicast simultaneously) 32,000 simultaneous voice calls and multimedia data of up to 10 Gbps with accounting, firewall, and call quality enabled Integrated with inbox high-availability infrastructure and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Relay

Software

The Cisco ASR 1000 Series is supported in Cisco IOS XE Software, which is introduced with the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers as a modular operating system. Based on Cisco IOS Software Release 12.2SR, Cisco IOS XE Software is designed to provide modular packaging, feature velocity, and powerful resiliency. Because of the extreme flexibility and robust performance of the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Embedded Services Processors (ESPs), which are based on the Cisco QuantumFlow Processor technology, Network Security, Deep Packet Inspection, Cisco IOS Firewall, and many other advanced features are implemented in Cisco IOS XE Software without the need of additional hardware support (for example, in the form of a service blade).

One of the most innovative features is that the Cisco IOS XE Software supports dual Cisco IOS Software consolidated packages in one single Cisco ASR 1000 Series Route Processor for software redundancy in the Cisco ASR 1002 and the Cisco ASR 1004 Router. This dual Cisco IOS Software consolidated package could be the same consolidated package for backup, or a different consolidated package also on a different Cisco IOS XE Software release for resilient upgrade. Information about the compatibility of supported dual consolidated packages is available in the release notes. The (optionally) hardware-redundant route processor and ESP configuration in the Cisco ASR 1006 Router does not support Cisco IOS Software redundancy in a single route processor since each of the two RPs support one Cisco IOS XE image.

Businesses today demand more from their networks than ever before.

Networks today now need to support all forms of media—including data, voice, and video—to enhance business communications and lower operating costs. Access has also changed, as thousands of new devices connect to the network via wireless and wired connections.

To solve these pressing challenges, organizations need their networks to contain intelligence and play an active role in securely integrating applications in a way that is easy to manage. Intelligent networks integrate many advanced applications into an adaptable, pervasive, and collaborative system.

Integrated Security:

In today's environment , a mix of point-product solutions is no longer sufficient protection.Network security must be pervasive and integrated into the fabric of the network infrastructure itself. The network becomes the main point of control for preventing and responding to security threats from internal and external sources. An integrated strategy includes multiple types of protection and dramatically improves the ability of networks to identify, prevent, and adapt to security threats. Such systems help to ensure information privacy, protect against threats, and control access to corporate resources.

IP Communications:

Voice, video, and other types of data are woven into a converged network. IP Communications—which includes IP telephony as well as unified messaging and voicemail; customer contact applications; and audio, Web, and rich-media conferencing tools—demonstrates the power of an intelligent network. Tight integration into the infrastructure means that each new application—video, Web, or telephony—is just another media type rather than an entirely different communications system. The applications themselves can intelligently communicate with the infrastructure to meet the constantly changing needs of the system.

Wireless:

Wireless cannot be viewed as an isolated application, especially when wireless access points scale into the hundreds or thousands. An intelligent network provides the framework that enables a wireless LAN solution to take full advantage of existing tools, knowledge, and resources of the wired infrastructure to address critical wireless LAN security, deployment, and control issues.

IP-based voice, wireless, and security are only the first in a new wave of advanced applications that are beginning to powerfully change the ways in which businesses operate. Organizations must consider how they can best enable their networks today so that their companies can continuously take advantage of new applications quickly, secure them easily, and manage them efficiently in pursuit of their business goals.

Additional Resources:

Documents:

Cisco Router Guide
Cisco Routing and Switching Technology Made Simple Guide
Integrated Services Router Poster