Cisco rolls out history at router launch

Cisco Systems Inc. on Tuesday gave the trappings of history to the unveiling of its biggest router yet, while carriers testing the product gave glimpses into the future of network applications and how they plan to keep up.

In opening the half-day event at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, Cisco President and Chief Executive Officer John Chambers reminded reporters, analysts, and other attendees that the IT industry has often underestimated future needs. The last time Cisco rolled out a top-of-the-line router, the 12000 Series in 1997, the company expected to sell about 1,000 of the boxes, Chambers told the audience. Cisco has now sold 25,000, he said.

This time around, the networking giant wants to believe it has a clearer idea what's coming down the pike and can better prepare carriers for it. The platform that Chambers and Senior Vice President and General Manager Mike Volpi ceremoniously unveiled Tuesday, called the Carrier Routing System (CRS-1), is designed with scalability and in-service upgradability to last at least 10 years, according to Cisco.

"Once we put it in place, we don't want to move it for one to two decades," Chambers said.

A single CRS-1 rack with 16 slots can process 1.2T bps (bits per second) of traffic, but the system as a whole can grow far beyond that, to 72 network-interface racks and eight special chassis to interconnect those boxes into one virtual system. Speed is a big selling point of the new system, including its 40G-bps WAN (wide area network) interfaces, which Cisco demonstrated with MCI Inc. by sending high-definition video over one such link while simulating thousands of simultaneous gaming, music downloading, video-on-demand, Web browsing and video phone call sessions.

Future bandwidth needs were on the minds of carriers testing the new platform who participated in the event. Sprint Corp. sees its steepest growth curves in wireless mobile services and in IP telephony services that it provides to cable companies, according to Kathy Walker, executive vice president of network services at the Overland Park, Kansas, carrier.

MCI Inc., for example, sees its corporate MPLS VPN (Multiprotocol Label Switching Virtual Private Network) service boosting its bandwidth use across many parts of the world, and peer-to-peer file sharing is quickly gobbling up more capacity at Japan's NTT Communications Corp.

Wolfgang Schmitz, senior executive vice president and head of technology at Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Com wired network unit, said streaming multimedia services will drive the need for bigger routers.

However, reliability is an even bigger priority, one that Cisco's new system is designed to meet through a modular design that allows for adding new capacity and customer services without taking the router out of service, according to Volpi. To build a router that combines the stability of a traditional, long-lasting telecommunications switch with the performance of a data switch, Cisco had to bridge two worlds, Volpi said.

"Historically, our industry has taken a very PC-centric approach to building devices," Volpi said. "Every two or three years you'd design a new one, with the idea that you'd take the old one out of service and put the new one in." About four years ago, Cisco decided it had to bring in some lessons from the carrier equipment industry.

"Marrying the two was very challenging," Volpi said.