Cisco Readies Flagship ASR 9000 for 5G, Multicloud

Cisco on Tuesday announced several enhancements to its flagship ASR 9000 service provider edge-routing platform, used to manage and deliver billions of connections over the network. The enhancements include new automation software, a new fourth-generation networking processor, and an enhanced IOS XR network operating system. 

Additionally, the vendor is offering new, more flexible, licensing models to purchase capacity on demand. 

“With these advancements to the Cisco ASR platform, we are simplifying, automating and converging our networking technology for the 5G and multicloud era,” said Sumeet Arora, senior vice president of engineering, service provider network systems at Cisco. “We are committed to helping our customers deliver better experiences for their customers, enabling them to optimize the capex spend with an easy road map for network planning purchasing and optimization.”

Sumeet Arora

Sumeet Arora

The latest ASR 9000 edge-routing platform enhancements target the explosive growth in internet users, and a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of IP traffic of 24 percent, from 2016 to 2021. 

“It does not stop here,” Arora wrote in a blog.

As people, devices, things and applications come online, the pace of innovation is accelerating at a rate never imagined before: 

For the more than 4,500 service provider customers using the ASR 9000, here’s a closer look at the new enhancements: 

With the fourth generation of in-house-built forwarding and traffic management silicon chipset, Cisco is scaling the ASR 9000 platform to help service providers cope with bandwidth explosion. Over the past 10 years, the ASR 9000’s slot capacity has been increased by a factor of 80, up to 3.2Tbps from 40G. More importantly, customers can benefit from this bandwidth increase without having to change their existing ASR 9000 chassis, which provides investment protection. 

“The ASR 9000’s fourth-generation network processor offers incredible power efficiency and low cost per bit, so it can be deployed into smaller, power-constrained location,” Arora writes. 

Finally, the platform offers advanced security by establishing a hardware root-of-trust for both software integrity and strong encryption within the IOS XR network operating system.  With hardware-rooted secure boot infrastructure, the IOS XR and ASR 9000 platforms provide significantly stronger protection against compromises of the firmware and operating system than typical firmware based secure boot infrastructures (such as those used in mainstream x86 platforms).  This, coupled with advanced runtime OS and control plane protections, allows the ASR 9000 platform unique capabilities to establish and maintain trust in exposed environments.