Cisco extends 7300 line

Cisco Wednesday unveiled a router for customer-edge applications such as a Internet-campus gateway or a service provider managed service.

The Cisco 7301 is a single-rack-unit device designed for service providers to offer managed services such as high-speed Internet, IP VPNs, and metro/WAN connectivity to enterprise companies. Cisco, citing a recent Gartner report, says the U.S. managed services market will grow at a 27.6% compound annual growth rate to $8.2 billion by 2006.

The 7301 sports three onboard copper or optical Gigabit Ethernet ports and three RJ-45 Fast Ethernet ports. It also includes a single-port adapter slot to support Cisco’s 7×00 series router interfaces.

Customers have invested more than $4 billion in 7×00 series network adapters since the router line debuted in the mid-1990s, Cisco says.

The 7301 features a 700-MHz integrated processor, up to 1G byte of dynamic RAM and up to 256M bytes of flash memory. The router can support up to 1 million routes and forwards over 900,000 packet/sec, Cisco claims.

WAN interfaces include serial and multichannel T-1/E-1 and T-3/E-3; OC-3/STM-1 packet-over-SONET and ATM; T-1/E-1 Inverse Multiplexing over ATM; ISDN Primary Rate Interface and Basic Rate Interface; and High-Speed Serial Interface. The product supports hardware encryption and Layer 3 compression for VPNs.

Among the managed service features the 7301 supports are Network Address Translation; Cisco’s Network Based Application Recognition; quality of service control through Committed Access Rate, Weighted Random Early Detection, and Weighted Fair Queuing; and stateful firewall.

Service provider applications for the 7301 include broadband aggregation, gateway functions between IPv4 and IPv6 networks, MPLS-customer edge, and a route reflector. The 7301 is currently installed at Canadian service provider PRIMUS Canada.

Separately, Cisco announced a port adapter carrier card for the 7304 router that allows the router to accept existing 7×00 series port adapters.

List pricing for the 7301 starts at $18,000; the Cisco 7304 starts at $22,000. Both products are now available.