San Jose, Calif. - Cisco Systems, Inc. yesterday unveiled a product that will help users deploy virtual private networks (VPN) and keep them from being disconnected from the Internet.
Cisco unveiled the AS5800, a high-end dial access concentrator for service provider points of presence. The AS5800 is designed to allow enterprises to deploy multimedia applications and take advantage of VPN and quality-of-service (QoS) offerings from their service providers.
The AS5800 combines a 14-slot dial shelf, housing up to 720 modems and a Cisco 7206 router. The AS5800 also sports up to 24 ISDN Primary Rate (PRI), and channelized T-1/E-1 interfaces. When configured in a Cisco AccessPath stack, the AS5800 can support tens of thousands of modems and 500 PRIs, Cisco said.
Each AS5800 modem card houses 72 modems, while the T-1/E-1 cards sport 12 ports. All AS5800 modem cards are hot-swappable, which means users can replace modem hardware without taking the system down. The system is designed to provide 99.999% availability, or about 5 minutes of downtime per year, Cisco said.
The AS5800 router shelf runs Cisco's IOS 11.3 routing software and all of the QoS and dial VPN features, such as NetFlow, the Resource Reservation Protocol, IP precedence, weighted fare queuing, Layer 2 tunneling protocol, Layer 2 forwarding and IP Security. It also can support Fast Ethernet, serial, High-Speed Serial Interface, ATM and Packet-over-Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) backhaul trunks.
The router shelf also can be upgraded to support a Cisco 7500 or 12000 Gigabit Switch Router, Cisco said.
Cisco customer BellSouth.net is evaluating the AS5800 for building out the dial capacity of its Internet service provider POPs. BellSouth.net, which currently uses Cisco's smaller scale AS5200 and AS5300, said the AS5800 "looks promising."
The AS5800 also supports Signaling System 7 (SS7), which enables users to integrate and interoperate with large-scale voice infrastructures in the public switched telephone network (PSTN). With SS7, the AS5800 also can off-load voice switches in the PSTN.
For management, Cisco rolled out the SC3640 System Controller for the AS5800. The SC3640 provides local data collection and parameter monitoring so WAN links are not backed up with management traffic.
Cisco has been steadily gaining share in the dial access concentrator market. Through the third quarter of 1997, Cisco held a 14.9% share of the $437.8 million in worldwide access concentrator revenue, up from 14.2% in the second quarter of 1997, according to Dell'Oro Group of Portola Valley, Calif.
Cisco's rivals in this market are Ascend Communications, Inc. and 3Com Corp. Ascend lost share between the second and third quarters, dropping from 36.5% to 29%, while 3Com rose from 35% to 41%, according to Dell'Oro. For the fourth quarter, Dataquest, Inc. projects that Cisco's revenue will rise by 53% sequentially, while 3Com's will drop by 20% and Ascend will decrease by 8% on a sequential basis.
Cisco hopes the AS5800 will help it eventually overtake Ascend and 3Com. The AS5800 is available now and costs $515 per port.
