As bandwidth-hogging applications such as YouTube, Spotify and the BBC’s iPlayer become a more popular way for office workers to spend their lunch break, bona fide business applications that run alongside them, such as CRM or even email apps, are struggling to get the bandwidth they need to operate effectively.
Network giant Cisco estimates that by 2013 video, including TV, video on demand, Internet video and peer-to-peer, will exceed 90% of global consumer traffic online.
Cisco recently doubled the density of its Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 9000 Series, adding a new single-slot 16 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) line card, delivering over 100 Gbps. Cisco says this should enable firms to scale their current services and enable new ones as and when they need to.
The ASR 9000 was originally introduced in November 2008, in preparation for what Cisco calls the ‘zettabyte era’. It is said to offer up to six times the capacity of comparable edge-router platforms, featuring up to 6.4 terabits per second of total capacity. It is also said to provide up to four times the line-card speed available elsewhere on the market, with 400 gigabits per slot.
This produces a performance that Cisco says is capable of streaming HD video into every house in Los Angeles simultaneously.
The Cisco ASR 9000 offers service providers tremendous scalability and a services-optimised architecture that truly sets a new benchmark in the industry for carrier Ethernet systems for the zettabyte era, said Pankaj Patel, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Service Provider Technology Group.
The Cisco ASR 9000 incorporates the Cisco Advanced Video Services Module (AVSM), which enables terabytes of streaming capacity at the aggregation edge while simultaneously offering content caching, ad insertion, fast channel change and error correction.
Now with the additional capacity courtesy of the new line card, Cisco claims the ASR 9000 is the industry’s highest-capacity and highest density edge router. It offers the capacity to grow to 320 x 10GE, or 32 x 100GE per system.
Cisco says that traditional routers built on centralised shared-memory architecture sometimes have trouble protecting and prioritising queued packets. This can result is videos stuttering, freezing or even failing. The ASR 9000 can support 384,000 queues per line card and a total of up to three million simultaneous queues per system.
The system can also enable customers to prioritise video services depending on customer needs, so, for example, a company can give priority to TelePresence over video streaming, Cisco claims.
The company is also keen to play up the green credentials of its ASR 9000. Cisco says that the annual environmental savings from the router equate to nearly 40,000 mobile phone charges, just under 20,000 gallons of fuel or 4,500 trees being spared from deforestation.
Since we launched the Cisco ASR 9000, it has been deployed in a wide range of edge applications from carrier Ethernet, IP RAN, and consumer and business services. This breadth of capability, coupled with its scale and Cisco IOS-XR, ensures that the Cisco ASR 9000 is the premier edge solution for service providers, said Patel.
