12800 reasons

Cisco extended its Internet core and edge router line with a series of products and enhancements, including a new high-end system to go up against an 18-month-old core offering from rival Juniper Networks.

Cisco extended its Internet core and edge router line with a series of products and enhancements, including a new high-end system to go up against an 18-month-old core offering from rival Juniper Networks.

The highlight of Cisco’s router flurry is the 12800, a 40G bit/sec-per-slot (full-duplex) Internet core router with higher density OC-192/STM-64 and OC-48/STM-16 line cards. The 12800 is Cisco’s response to Juniper’s T640, a 40G bit/sec-per-slot-capable system that supports 32 OC-192c ports per eight-slot, half-rack chassis.

The 12800 is a switch fabric upgrade to Cisco’s current 10- and 16-slot 12000 router chassis. It supports all available 12000 series line cards as well.

The higher-density line cards are a two-port OC-192c and an eight-port OC-48c module. This brings OC-192c densities to 16 for the 10-slot router and 30 for the 16-slot router, which is still half that of the Juniper T640.

But Cisco claims the 12800 fabric quadruples the 320G bit/sec switching capacity of its previous high-end core, the 12416.

And Cisco remains the market leader in Internet core routers with a 72% revenue share in the third quarter to Juniper’s 20%, according to Infonetics Research.

Pricing for the 12800 starts at $178,500. The two-port OC-192c line card costs $405,000. The eight-port OC-48c module costs $468,000. All products will be available in January.

Meanwhile, Cisco did not provide details on how it plans to scale its routers to multi-terabit systems, a plan Juniper divulged 18 months ago via a multichassis interconnect called the TX. Tony Bates, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Carrier Core and Multiservice Business Unit, says there are no multichassis plans for the 12000 series, suggesting that Cisco is developing a whole new platform for multi-terabit requirements.

Juniper, meanwhile, says it will announce customer trials for the TX interconnect in the first half of 2004.