Cisco yesterday announced additions to the Cisco 7200 series routers, including new chassis, a beefed-up processor and voice and video integration capabilities.
New products and features include the four-slot Cisco 7204VXR, the six-slot Cisco 7206VXR, the NPE-300 processing engine and Cisco's first implementation of the so-called Multiservice Interchange (MIX) for voice and video integration.
The NPE-300 provides a 50% increase in performance for the 7200, to 300,000 packet/sec. A Cisco 7200VXR equipped with an NPE-300 can support up to six port adapters and enable connectivity via Gigabit Ethernet and OC-12 ATM. In addition, the NPE-300 increases the amount of main memory to 256M bytes of SDRAM, double the limit of 128M bytes of DRAM on the NPE-200.
For the Cisco 7200VXR, Cisco has enhanced the Cisco 7200 midplane, which connects the port adapters to the NPE-300. The VXR midplane provides up to 1G bit/sec of throughput and twice as much bandwidth as a standard 7200 midplane.
In addition, the VXR midplane includes a MIX, which supports switching of DS-0 time slots via MIX interconnects across the midplane to each port adapter slot. The MIX in the Cisco 7200 VXR provides the ability to switch DS-0 time slots between multichannel T-1 and E-1 interfaces, similar to a digital cross connect or an add-drop multiplexer.
In the future, this will enable the Cisco 7200 VXR to switch DS-0 voice channels on a T-1/E-1 interface on one port adapter to and from a separate voice processing port adapter. It will also enable DS-0s to be switched through the Cisco 7200 VXR without any processing, a requirement in certain voice configurations.
The Cisco 7206VXR supports up to 48 Ethernet or serial-clear-channel or channelized-ports, 24 token-ring ports, 12 HSSI ports, and six Fast Ethernet or ATM ports. For multichannel networking in channelized T-1, E-1, T-3 or E-3 environments, the Cisco 7200 series VXR can support up to 48 channelized T-1s/E-1s and up to six channelized T-3s/E-3s.
The Cisco 7200 series VXR will be available in December starting at $14,000.
The NPE-300 will also be available in December for $7,500.
RELATED LINKS
