Cisco extends its 7200, 7300, 7400, 7500, and 7600 series of routers with multiservice enhancements designed to help service providers deploy next-generation services.

by Wayne Kawamoto [May 10, 2002]

Cisco Systems announced hardware and software enhancements across its line of mid-range routing products—the Cisco 7200, 7300, 7400, 7500, and 7600 Series Routers—that promise to extend the delivery of services to the network edge while providing an integrated path to next-generation multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) infrastructures and Internet Protocol (IP)-based capabilities. The new capabilities are designed to deliver advanced quality of service (QoS), high availability, and security services that help support critical network-enabled applications that increase productivity.

Cisco also announced 14 new platforms and several enhancements to its portfolio of modular access routers. Together, the company says that its new products and enhancements will extend its comprehensive router portfolio further from the single corporate teleworker and small office, to the enterprise branch and headquarters, through to the service provider's network edge.

Mid-range routers
Cisco's family of mid-range routers are designed to deliver multi-service capabilities that are required for public carrier service creation, which may allow for a seamless transport of the installed base of Frame Relay, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), and PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol)/HDLC (High-level Data Link Control) traffic, along with new Metro Ethernet traffic, through a new Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (VPN) service offering over a common MPLS-based core backbone.

Known as Any Transport over MPLS (AToM), this advanced Cisco IOS software-based service offering is designed to let public carriers converge multiple disparate data networks onto a single MPLS-based backbone to save capital and operational costs. This carrier transition to an MPLS backbone, while transparent to end users, is intended to lay the groundwork for future expanded service offerings and revenue-generating opportunities. Using its MPLS foundation, AToM offers advanced, revenue generating services such as QoS and Traffic Engineering, that let service providers charge based on traffic class and maximize network utilization.

In addition, the Cisco mid-range routing family is designed to provide integrated support for the second phase of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) technology, supported within Cisco IOS software, and now available on the Cisco 7200, 7400, 7500. Phase II of Cisco's IPv6 offers tighter integration into IPv4, and is designed to bring additional traffic filtering support, scalable routing, cost-effective integration of IPv6 services over MPLS infrastructures, and distributed switching to the mid-range routing family.

Delivery of these new Layer 2 MPLS VPN and IPv6 solutions are anchored by improvements to Cisco's Element Manager Software (EMS). Cisco EMS promises to offer comprehensive management, along with deployment and provisioning functionality.

Cisco 7600 Series
The Cisco 7600 Series is designed to be a scalable and versatile system that delivers high touch Layer 2 and Layer 3 services for Wide Area Network (WAN) edge aggregation, Metro Ethernet aggregation, and Internet Data Center and Enterprise head-end applications. In addition to the new two-port OC-48c/STM-16 POS/DPT OSM for Metro IP applications, there is also a new one-port Channelized OC-12/STM-4 OSM and a new one-port Channelized OC-48/STM-16 OSM that may deliver both capital and operational cost savings through improved circuit provisioning efficiency and port density.

(POS stands for Packet over SONET, DPT stands for Dynamic Packet Transport, and OSM stands for Optical Services Module.)

The multi-service feature set of the Cisco 7600 is designed to give service providers a single system on which to deploy Ethernet, ATM, and Frame Relay leased line services at the edge of their networks. According to the company, its Cisco 7600 now delivers new capabilities for Layer 2 Frame Relay support on channelized and POS modules, new Layer 2 ATM support with delivery of bridged RFC 1483 PVCs to complement existing support for routed PVCs, and new Metro Ethernet aggregation features such as 802.1Q-in-Q hierarchical VLAN mapping to Layer 2 Ethernet transport over MPLS.

The platform is also designed to provide full support for Layer 3 RFC 2547bis MPLS VPNs, providing a total suite of Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN features for carrier services. Complementary feature enhancements to the platform include hardware accelerated, advanced QoS services such as CBWFQ (Class-based Weighted Fair Queuing) and LLQ (Low-Latency Queuing), which may be useful in enterprise deployments where delay-sensitive applications requiring prioritization with low-latency per class of service can be handled more efficiently for better traffic management and network performance.

Cisco 7300 Series
The Cisco 7300 Series is designed to be a compact, high performance enterprise aggregation or customer premise equipment (CPE) router, enabling the network edge where high-performance, intelligent IP and multiprotocol services are required. Several new line cards for the Cisco 7300 Series are now available: a six-port clear channel DS-3 line card, a two-port OC-3c/STM-1 ATM line card, a two-port OC-3c/STM-1 POS line card, and one-port and 2-port OC-12c/STM-4 POS line cards. These new cards are designed to enhance the versatility of the Cisco 7300 Series platform, with interface options ranging from DS-3 to OC-48c/STM-16 connectivity.

Like the Cisco 7600, new hardware-accelerated, intelligent QoS services for the platform such as classification and prioritization with WRED (Weighted Random Early Detection) may ensure that time sensitive traffic receives network priority. The 7300 should also deliver hardware-accelerated support for Frame Relay Encapsulation, RPF (Reverse Path Forwarding), and 802.1Q VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) trunking. Additionally, the Cisco 7300 offers new high availability features through available route processor redundancy that may reduce network downtime and operating costs.

Cisco 7500 Series
The Cisco 7500 Series is a chassis-based router that's designed to deliver a breadth of services, diverse interfaces, reliability, and performance required for network edge applications. The addition of the Route Switch Processor 16 (RSP 16) and Versatile Interface Processor 6-80 (VIP 6-80) to the Cisco 7500 Series should bring higher performance over an extensive range of distributed features for both enterprise and service provider customers who want high-performance, high-speed interfaces and applications. Current customers may be able to leverage their installed base of 7500 Series routers and port adapters, using the new RSP16 and VIP6-80 to provide additional scalability and performance to existing deployments.

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