Cisco is reinventing edge routing with the Cisco® ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers, a portfolio of midrange routers that establish a new price-to-performance class offering, benefiting both service providers and enterprises alike:
- For service providers, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers facilitate more flexible, efficient, and cost-effective delivery of complex consumer and business services
- For enterprises, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers deliver a highly reliable, high-performance WAN edge solution where information, communication, collaboration, and commerce converge
The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers:
- Accelerate services by offering outstanding performance and resiliency with optimized, intelligent services
- Establish a new benchmark for price-to-performance offerings in the enterprise advanced routing, service provider edge, and broadband aggregation segments
- Facilitate significant network architectural innovations in areas such as secure WAN aggregation, managed customer-premises-equipment (CPE) services, and service provider edge services
- Reduce operating expenses (OpEx) and capital expenditures (CapEx) by facilitating managed or hosted services over identical architectures and operating environments
Product Overview
The Cisco ASR 1000 Series consists of these different versions (Figure 1): the Cisco ASR 1001 Router, the Cisco ASR 1002 Fixed Router, the Cisco ASR 1002 Router, the Cisco ASR 1002-X Router, the Cisco ASR 1004 Router, the Cisco ASR 1006 Router, and the Cisco ASR 1013 Router. All models use the innovative and powerful Cisco QuantumFlow Processor, which provides a huge leap in performance and resiliency for network processors.
Figure 1. Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers
The Cisco ASR 1000 Series provides a significant enhanced value compared to prior generations of Cisco midrange routing solutions by providing more than tenfold performance improvement with services running. Additionally, the routers have hardware and software redundancy, as well as an industry-leading high-availability design.
The Cisco ASR 1000 Series delivers multiple services embedded in the Cisco QuantumFlow Processor at wire speeds from 2.5 to 100 Gbps. The services supported on the Cisco QuantumFlow Processor include security services (for example, encryption and firewall), quality of service (QoS), Network-Based Application Recognition
(NBAR), Cisco IOS® Flexible Packet Matching (FPM), broadband aggregation, and Cisco Unified Border Element
(SP Edition) (formerly called Session Border Controller, or SBC), among others.
With the separation of the control and data planes in the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router architecture, software redundancy (on the Cisco ASR 1001, ASR 1002 Fixed, ASR 1002, ASR 1002-X, and ASR 1004 Routers) and hardware redundancy (on the Cisco ASR 1006 and ASR 1013 Routers) are provided. Additionally, the modular Cisco IOS XE Software that is introduced with the Cisco ASR 1000 Series facilitates In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU).
The Cisco ASR 1001 Router also introduces the concept of integrated daughter cards (IDCs). There is one Cisco ASR 1001 base model without an integrated daughter card and five models with integrated daughter cards offering different additional I/O connectivity or an integrated hard disk drive (HDD); their part numbers follow:
As of Cisco IOS XE Software Release 3.2S:
- ASR1001: Base version without an IDC
- ASR1001-2XOC3POS: Delivered with an IDC that provides 2 OC-3 Packet-over-SONET/SDH (PoS) ports
- ASR1001-4XT3: Delivered with an IDC that provides 4 T3 ports (no E3 circuitry)
As of Cisco IOS XE Software Release 3.3S:
- ASR1001-4X1GE: Delivered with an IDC that provides 4 GE ports
- ASR1001-8CHT1E1: Delivered with an IDC that provides 8 channelized T1/E1 ports
- ASR1001-HDD: Delivered with an integrated HDD
Note: The IDCs are not field-upgradable.
Cisco Software Activation is supported for performance upgrade from 2.5 to 5 Gbps (on the Cisco ASR 1001
Router) and from 5 to 10, 20, or 36 Gbps (on the Cisco ASR 1002-X Router). From a price-to-performance perspective, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router solution fits well between the Cisco 7200 Series, Cisco 7300
Series, and Cisco 7600 Series; Cisco ASR 9000 Series; and Cisco Catalyst® 6000 Series Routers, thus
dramatically enhancing the Cisco midrange routing portfolio (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Cisco Midrange Routing Portfolio
More details about the individual Cisco ASR 1000 Series components, such as the Cisco ASR 1000 Series
Embedded Services Processors (ESPs), the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Route Processors, and the Cisco ASR 1000
Series SPA Interface Processor (SIP) cards, are available in the respective data sheets:
Cisco ASR 1000 Series ESPs: http://www.cisco.com/go/asr1000
Cisco ASR 1000 Series Route Processor: http://www.cisco.com/go/asr1000
Cisco ASR 1000 Series SIP: http://www.cisco.com/go/asr1000