Cisco's Carrier Routing System (CRS-1) is the company's
attempt at building a network infrastructure that will allow voice,
data and video traffic to run off a single IP
network.
To tie in with its celebration of 20 years in business Cisco
unveiled the high-end router last week in San Jose.
CRS-1 represents Cisco's vision of the converged network. It hopes
the architecture used in CRS-1 will provide telecoms operators with
enough headroom to cope with bandwidth demands for the next 10 to
20 years.
Cisco chief executive John Chambers said, "From an architectural
perspective we continue to see the evolution of what we believe
will be four generations of network architectures: convergence of
data, voice, and video; end-to-end IP networks; network of
networks; and an evolution to the intelligent information
network."
Cisco said CRS-1 would allow telecoms operators to converge their
voice, data, and video applications onto one IP-based network. At
the same time, CRS-1's scale and performance would let service
providers offer virtually unlimited amounts of bandwidth,
End-users are unlikely to require the 92tbps the high-end router
promises to deliver. But the technology aims to address service
levels and provide high availability - both areas of concern for
users who have outsourced their wide area network infrastructure to
an IP virtual private network provider.
The IP VPN has proved a popular way for users to offset telecoms
costs by replacing dedicated leased lines between sites with a
connection into a carrier's internet backbone. Multi-protocol layer
switching is used to ensure quality of service on the network, by
preventing internet traffic from interfering with a user's own IP
traffic.
But, according to John Doyle, director of product marketing at
Cisco, today's IP VPNs have a shortcoming in that there can be some
interference. He said, "The CRS-1 allows network operators to
completely partition their networks to maintain service levels,
unlike today's networks."
Ovum analyst Mark Main said, "The use of logical routers in CRS-1
ought to reduce the impact of oneÊcustomer's traffic on another's,
particularly if applied to the entire end-to-end system. Until all
the routers in a VPN are so enabled, there remains the possibility
of such interaction."
The Cisco Internetwork operating system has been rewritten as a
"memory-protected, microkernel-based operating system", a design
which Cisco said would support in-service upgrades. The new
operating system aims to provide fault containment and automatic
fault recovery so that processes can be started, stopped and
upgraded without human intervention.