As carriers start to open their spending wallets again, there is growing competition among hardware vendors to address the need service providers have to both easily deploy new services for customers (such as streaming video or interactive services, like online gaming), and to converge those services onto a single IP-based backbone for better cost savings. Juniper's T-640 Series carrier routers, introduced in 2002, as well as Avici's TSR routers precede Cisco's CSR-1 offering, while startups like Hammerhead Systems are also targeting the renewed service-provider market.
According to Cisco's Bates, carriers considering new systems worry less about "speeds and feeds" and more about "creating a system that will scale without impacting services." Those concerns, he said, drove the creation of the new operating system software, called IOS XR, which Bates said will allow for system maintenance, upgrades and operations without interruption, a capability not supported in current Cisco routers.
"There's no need to reboot or take things down," Bates said. The IOS XR was also built to allow multiple CRS-1 chassis, or "shelves," to be managed as a single routing unit, a key to providing the system's huge capacity (it supports up to 1,152 40-Gbps line-card slots, according to Cisco) and throughput.
On the back end, Cisco claims to have the industry's first OC-768 interface, a serial connection that Bates said will allow for direct optical 40 Gbps connections between routers on the Internet backbone. The CRS-1 will also introduce a graphical management tool, as well as a "flexible" internal architecture that Bates said allows for the "decoupling" of interface cards from the back-end network services. Such flexibility gives service providers a way to better converge client services onto a single backbone for cost savings.
Despite its market lead in overall router sales and the networking industry as a whole, Cisco still has some doubters in the top echelons of networking. While Bates admits that overcoming perceptions of instability among service providers is "top of the mind" at Cisco, he also said the company doesn't get credit it deserves for being used in large, busy networks.
