Cisco takes routers to the edge: Aggregation Services Router

Cisco is set to save the planet while enabling the unfettered proliferation of YouTube videos as it unveiled its Aggregation Services Router 1000 at CeBIT, Hanover today.
This is a big launch for the company, which spent $250m to bringthis edge router to market. First day endorsements from NTT, BT,Lufthansa and Wachovia, the big US bank, show that Juniper, the marketleader for edge routers, has a fight on its hands.
BT said the ASR 1000 is critical to the roll-out of its IP-based21st Century Network, while NTT will put it at the heart of its IPTVeffort.
Video and IPTV are key rationales for the ASR 1000's development.Cisco opened today's launch press conference with a breathlessdeclaration that we are entering an "Exabyte" age, with traffic hitting29 Exabytes, or 29 billion GB, per month by 2011. The takeoff of videoover the internet is to blame. Video was a negligible component of nettraffic in the late 90s, and a minor consideration in 2003 when Ciscolaunched its CRS-1, which was seen as overkill at the time, the companysays.
In action, the ASR 1000 will find its way to the edge of wide areanetworks, where it will aggregate disparate services, such as security,broadband aggregation and deep packet inspection, before they hit thecore network. That means one box fits all - and lower maintenance andpower costs, Cisco says.
At the core of the ASR 1000 is a custom asic, the QuantumFlow, with800m transistors, which cost Cisco $100m alone to develop. The 2 inchby 2 inch chip can run 160 threads at 0.5w per process. Cisco comparedthis to the Core 2 mobile chip from Intel, which chugs through twothreads at a time at 5w per thread. So what does this mean in practice?According to Cisco, the Quantumflow can "process 24,000,000instructions in the time it takes an average person to blink". No, wecan't visualise this, either. How about this, then? The Quantumflowprocessor can "provide equivalent processing power to 20 dual-coreservers, using 10 times less space and 38,990 fewer kilowatt-hours peryear".
The basic box - the 1000 can run two virtualized copies of Cisco's IOS software,allowing failover from one image to another without the need forhardware redundancy. Which is a good thing, as the basic box – the 1000- starts at $35k when it ships next month.
Services are built into the router, with customers buying licensekeys as needed to bring them on stream. Cisco said the box is able tosupport future services.
And if that’s not enough, the ASR 1000 range - there are threeversions - saves the rainforest as well. According to research cited byCisco, for each ASR 1006 deployed compared to a “competitor” – thepresentation doesn’t say who, but Juniper was mentioned in the pressconference - equates to saving eight tons of coal, three cars standingidle, or 0.1 acres of trees.