Cisco Unveils New High-Performance WAN Edge Router

The new Aggregation Services Router (ASR) family comes after five years of development at a cost to Cisco of over $250 million, the company said.

The ASR incorporates IOS XE, a virtualized version of Cisco's Internetwork Operating System that enables "instant on" service provisioning for features such as firewall, quality of service, deep packet inspection and session border control, said Jonathan Davidson, director of product management for midrange routers.

SLIDESHOW: Cisco's New High-Performance Routers

The new ASRs provide unparalleled levels of resiliency and application availability, as solution providers can upgrade the software running the routers without taking them out of service, Davidson said. In the same way, problems or failures can occur without interrupting services, he said.

"The ASR enables in-service software upgrades or software failover without redundant hardware," Davidson said. "You can run two or three versions of software at the same time. You can leave it running in standby mode, put a revised version [of software] on, and if there is any problem, it will failover back to the trusted version of the software."

The new Cisco routers will help meet the increasing demands customers are putting on their networks, said Brett Rushton, vice president of network strategy and infrastructure at Calence, a Tempe, Ariz.-based Cisco partner, which is in the process of being acquired by Insight Enterprises.

"Clients are starting to build out larger WANs, with data center and server consolidation, application acceleration," he said. "The expectations for most clients are usual not one, two or three nines anymore; it's an always-on network, particularly as clients go global."

The new line also fills a gap in Cisco's portfolio, he said.

"There's always been a pretty big gap between the 7200 and 7500 [Series routers] in terms of price/performance and functionality. Both have been tried and true workhorses, but they lacked some of the advanced services, like truly scalable VPN," Rushton said.

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