Cisco soups up edge router

Cisco last week unveiled a processor for its 7304 edge routers which processes more than 1-million packet/sec.

The NPE-G100 Network Processing Engine supports 1G byte of synchronous dynamic random access memory and 256M byte of Flash memory. It sports three onboard Ethernet/Fast Ethernet/Gigabit Ethernet ports.

The processor is designed to support Cisco IOS software features such as IPv6, multicast, Any Transport over Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS), Virtual Routing and Forwarding-Select – which enables network operators to provide the appearance of multiple network topologies on a single interface – and network-based application recognition services.

Cisco’s 7304 router is a four-slot, four-rack-unit device designed for “high-touch” IP and MPLS applications – aggregation, gateway, or managed service CPE. The router supports interfaces ranging from DS-0 to OC-48/STM-16. 

The 7304 router with the NPE-G100 Network Processing Engine will be available in May priced at $22,000.

Cisco also offers the NSE-100 processor for the 7304. This processor features 450,000-packet/sec performance, or 3.5 million packet/sec with Cisco’s Parallel Express Forwarding hardware acceleration.

The NSE-100 also sports two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and supports 512M byte of SDRAM and up to 128M byte of Flash memory.