Cisco readies upgrade for 10000 series

Cisco does not plan to match Juniper's recent broadband remote access server bandwidth volley when it unveils upgrades to its 10000 series aggregation router later this year.

Cisco is expected to roll out the next generation of its 10000 series platform, which will include enhanced broadband aggregation features and increased capacity as well as software upgrades to provide a common release cycle to better align the router's leased-line and broadband aggregation features. The 10000 series currently supports 60,000 to 64,000 sessions with a second-generation Performance Routing Engine (PRE-2) that processes 6.2 million packet/sec.

Broadband remote access server (B-RAS) routers are in high demand among service providers looking to provide packetized voice, data and video "triple play" services to businesses and consumers. Cisco's 10000 series router is one such B-RAS, as are Juniper's new E320, Laurel Networks' ST 200 and ST 50 platforms, Riverstone's 15000 and RS systems, and Alcatel's 7750 and 7450 routers.

Cisco's competitors believe the next-generation 10000 will have a PRE-3 that provides 10 million packet/sec of performance as well as software that provides hitless failover for increased uptime. Hitless failover provides continuous packet forwarding even when a primary controller is failing and backing up to a secondary one.

Mike Volpi, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Routing Technology group, would not confirm this, but did mention that the next release would boost subscriber support beyond 64,000 sessions and that the broadband aggregation software features of the 10000 would find their way to other Cisco platforms.

"Anything that runs IOS, so long as it has the appropriate hardware support, can run the broadband aggregation software," Volpi says. "We will be releasing new versions of the broadband aggregation software that has a richer set of features. But we haven't specified time frames or what additional features."

He says the 10000 series will not approach the throughput numbers introduced earlier this month by Juniper's E320. The E320 supports 320G bit/sec of bandwidth and 128,000 subscribers, while the backplane capacity of the eight-slot 10008 router is 51.2G bit/sec.

"We don't quite see the market developing that way," Volpi says of the E320. "If you look at their product, it is at the crossroads between metro Ethernet aggregation . . . and it also has the design of being a very large broadband remote access server. If you look at how triple play evolves, it doesn't make a huge amount of sense to feed all of the video through the broadband remote access server. [The 10000 is] not designed to be in the path of all the video traffic."

Instead, Cisco proposes a two-box approach in which video would be handled by a metropolitan Ethernet aggregation router such as Cisco's 7600 series systems, Volpi says. The traffic that needs to go through the B-RAS for the high packet manipulation of subscriber service processing gets parsed off at the 7600 and fed through the B-RAS.