Cisco Systems Inc. today announced three modular enhancements to its 7200 Services Aggregation Router, which can harness at headquarters the power of a deployed base of Integrated Services Routers in numerous branch offices.
The 7200, sometimes known as the "Swiss Army knife of routers," now has more than 300,000 units installed globally. With Cisco's announcement at Interop Las Vegas on Monday, the 7200 can be upgraded to include the new Cisco 7200 Network Processing Engine (NPE-G2), the Cisco 7200 VPN Services Adapter (VSA), and the Cisco 7200 Port Adapter Jacket Card to securely aggregate routing at optical carrier-3 (OC-3) and gigabit Ethernet speeds.
Joel Conover, of research firm Current Analysis, said in a statement that the enhancement will provide "Cisco 7200 customers with a multitude of service options while increasing power and flexibility, setting them up for future business demands."
The NPE-G2, the latest routing engine for the Cisco 7200VXR chassis, doubles performance for multiple services while including threat defense, secure VPN connectivity, network admission control, and voice/IP-to-IP gateway functions. The module can handle more security functions with faster processing and additional memory.
The VSA is a VPN hardware acceleration module that can triple performance from remote sites when combined with the latest processing engine, which can support large-scale IPsec aggregation architecture and secure Cisco IOS Software connectivity. It contains various levels of encryption support.
Lastly, the 7200 Port Adapter Jacket Card boosts slot density by being able to hold a single port adapter for additional capacity on systems with the Cisco 7200 NPE-G1 and later Network Processing Engines. Cisco said the module can nearly double bandwidth to the router.
Robert Checketts, senior manager of router product marketing at Cisco, said the enhancements to the 7200 can aggregate the services of the ISR by bringing the exact same functionality to home offices instead of just the branch.
The updates can be delivered to Cisco 7200 customers as an upgrade, Checketts said, with no new platform to purchase.
Cisco boosts speed, security of 7200 router
Cisco Advances Global Routing Leadership With New Cisco 7200 Router Products
LAS VEGAS -- Cisco Sets Industry First With New Levels of Services Aggregation for Customers Demanding Increased Performance and Flexibility With the Most Widely Deployed WAN Aggregation Router. Cisco Systems(R) (Nasdaq:CSCO) today announced three new products for the Cisco(R) 7200 Series Routers, delivering wide-area network (WAN) and metropolitan-area network (MAN) services aggregation with a unique combination of scalability, value, performance and flexibility. The new products help ensure that customers meet the increasing requirements of headquarters locations for power, security and capacity, driven by integrated services such as advanced security, voice and video deployed by branch offices.
The new Cisco 7200 Network Processing Engine (NPE-G2), Cisco 7200 VPN Services Adapter (VSA), and Cisco 7200 Port Adapter Jacket Card set a new benchmark for highly secure services aggregation routing at optical carrier-3 (OC-3) and gigabit Ethernet (GE) speeds.
"The continued global success of the Cisco 7200 Series Routers lies in Cisco's ability to continue to innovate with new products that keep ahead of customer needs," said Joel Conover from research firm Current Analysis. "With the introduction of these new products, Cisco solidifies its leadership in the routing space by providing Cisco 7200 customers with a multitude of service options while increasing power and flexibility, setting them up for future business demands."
More Secure, Powerful, Flexible and Scalable Services Aggregation
Services integration into the Cisco 7200 Series Routers helps customers reduce operating costs and simplify installation, maintenance and network management. In addition, the ability to add advanced services without the need for forklift upgrades protects the customer's original investment.
The Cisco 7200 NPE-G2 is the newest routing engine for the Cisco 7200VXR chassis. With double the performance for multiple services from previous generations and full Cisco IOS(R) Software feature support, the Cisco 7200 NPE-G2 has the highest performance and scalability within the family of network processing engines. Additional features include threat defense, highly secure virtual private network (VPN) connectivity, network admission control and voice/IP-to-IP gateway functions.
The Cisco 7200 VSA is a VPN hardware acceleration module that can provide up to triple performance improvement when combined with the Cisco 7200 NPE-G2 card. This increased performance supports large-scale IPsec aggregation architectures and more secure Cisco IOS Software connectivity.
To meet the increasing needs of flexibility and capacity, the Cisco 7200 Port Adapter Jacket Card addresses the demand for additional slot density. The I/O slot can now hold a single port adapter for additional capacity on systems with the Cisco 7200 NPE-G1 and later Network Processing Engine. This provides a cost-effective way to increase the slot density in parallel with the increased switching capacity of the newest engine -- the Cisco 7200 NPE-G2.
Customers Seek Optimized IP Services Aggregation
With more than 330,000 installations worldwide, the Cisco 7200 Series Routers continues to power the enterprise and service provider networks with new cutting-edge innovations. These enhancements to the Cisco 7200 Series Routers are extremely popular with customers who desire platforms with flexibility, scalability and investment protection.
Wachovia Bank, one of the largest banking and full-service brokerages in the United States, provides services to more than 15 million households and businesses. Wachovia provides a wide mix of transactions from automated teller machines (ATM) to brokerage services to mortgage loans.
"At Wachovia, it is essential to maintain a high level of service for our customers. To keep up with new technology and continue to improve our customer experiences, we need a highly scalable and versatile network that can evolve with increasing network and services demands," says John Burns, vice president of network services at Wachovia. "With the Cisco 7200 router, we can add dimensions and scale to increasing performance and services needs without having to replace the platform. This saves us training and deployment costs when replacing a network. The ability to evolve the network and extend our original investments with our needs has saved us millions of dollars."
Architectural Approach Grows with Changing Business Needs
Cisco provides aggregation customers with architectures based on proven Cisco 7200 deployments. As part of the Cisco Service Oriented Networking Architecture (SONA), these scalable architectures help customers decrease deployment times and design overhead costs while integrating services such as security, voice and video into WAN and MAN infrastructures. Cisco also offers Cisco Lifecycle Services to help customers with ongoing network operation and optimization services. The architectures combined with customer services help enable IT organizations better support and scale to changing business needs, and drive overall business growth and efficiency.
Cisco Product Pricing, Availability and More Information
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Cisco Product List Pricing Availability
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Cisco 7200 Series Network Processing
Engine $19,000 May 2006
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Cisco 7200 VPN Services Adapter $15,000 CY06H2
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Cisco 7200 Port Adapter Jacket Card $ 1,250 Now
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For more information about the products announced today, visit: www.cisco.com/go/servicesaggregation.
About Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.
Cisco, Cisco Systems, the Cisco Systems logo and Cisco IOS are registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. in the U.S. and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.
"Cisco Advances Global Routing Leadership With New Cisco 7200 Router Products". Business Wire. FindArticles.com. 19 Feb, 2009. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2006_May_1/ai_n16135050
Cisco injects old 7200 with new power
(InfoWorld Electronic News Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Its not terribly often that hardware vendors are so forward-thinking that they can retrofit a whole new class of hardware into an existing chassis. Cisco Systems, however, seems to be able to do this with ease. The new Cisco 7200 router is a perfect example.
The 7000-series core routers have been the mainstays of ISP and large MAN/WAN deployments for decades. The now-deceased Cisco 7010 could be found at the core of nearly every ISP in the mid-90s, boasting 10Mb Ethernet ports and the ability to handle HSSI (high-speed serial interface) and traditional T1/T3 services in a modular fashion. The later models in the same series, such as the 7500 and 7600, built on that base to deliver more horsepower and more high-speed connectivity options within a large-footprint modular chassis.
The 7200, first introduced several years ago, was the middle of the road. With high-speed modules dropping in size, it became possible to fit much more into a much smaller space. The 7202, 7204, and 7206 represented three variations on a common theme: A modular workhorse router that could grow with the needs of the infrastructure.
The new 7200-series is the latest example of that capability, taking the 7200 to places its never been before. Rather than introducing a completely new router series, Cisco has simply released new core modules for the existing 7200 routers, resulting in the ability to do wholesale upgrades to existing routers without unracking anything.
This collection of new gear for the 7200 series is aimed at companies looking to leverage their existing hardware in new ways, such as high-bandwidth VPN aggregation. The new 7200VXR NPE-G2 (Network Processing Engine) promises twice the performance of the existing NPE, and the VSA (VPN Services Adapter) provides encryption offloading to kick those VPN tunnels into high gear. Not only are these modules now available, but with the new Port Adapter Jacket Card, some new features can be implemented without reducing the available slot count on existing 7200 routers.
Starting at the top, the new NPE-G2 offers some serious horsepower. Leveraging 1GB of SDRAM and 256MB of onboard flash, it has three built-in gigabit Ethernet ports, one fast Ethernet port, and two USB ports. The gigabit Ethernet ports are all dual-personality, and can be ordered as either copper/GBIC or copper/SFP, which lets admins leverage existing hardware in the upgrade, or at least defer the cost of GBICs with lower-cost SFP optics. With the new NPE, Cisco has the ability to offer much more than just simple routing capabilities in the 7200. Their services matrix for this router runs from firewalling and IPS duties to VPN end point termination, to voice, video, QoS, and multicast routing tasks, all within the same box. In short, theyre trying to fit the 7200 into nearly every corner of the network, either all-in-one, or a la carte, and with notable success.
I had two Cisco 7206 routers in the lab, equipped with the new NPE-G2 as well as the VSA module. The testing I conducted was based around high-speed VPN configurations, basically AES and 3DES VPNs running at gigabit speeds between the routers. To drive all the testing, I relied on a Spirent SmartBits chassis with a few gigabit interfaces to generate traffic through the VPN constructed between the two 7206 routers. Ciscos VPN performance claims were well founded, with my results showing just under wire-speed gigabit IPSec VPN operation between the two routers. Even without the VPN in place, I was able to achieve just under wire-rate throughout the testing, with a max of 960Mb throughput.
As with nearly every mid- to high-end Cisco device, proper configuration and maintenance can be a challenge for the uninitiated. Its certainly not something to be done casually, nor without the proper training and experience. Cisco IOS has long been the bane as well as the savior of networking. Hideously complex in places, and obscenely powerful and configurable in others, its the stuff of legend. Just trying to navigate through the Cisco Web sites software support matrix to determine the proper IOS version and sub-version for a specific piece of hardware can be trying, not to mention the half-dozen or so authentication requests as you navigate through the process. High-end internetworking has never been, nor is ever likely to be simple, but sometimes it seems that Ciscos being purposefully obtuse in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Ciscos attempts at providing GUI tools for their hardware has never really produced a workable mid-range solution, although the Cisco Network Assistant (CNA) application for switched infrastructures does a fairly decent job of simplifying common administration tasks such as VLAN port assignments without requiring the massive financial and physical resources needed to implement their high-end CiscoWorks suite. CNA doesnt support the devices at the top of the Cisco food chain, such as the Catalyst 6509 or the 7200 routers. Cisco has been pushing SDM (Security Device Manager), a new GUI for their higher-end devices, however, and the 7200 is supported for basic routing configurations as well as advanced features such as firewall, VPN, QoS, and IPS configurations. This is a relatively new step for Cisco, and a good one, although it will certainly be eschewed by Cisco CLI gurus.
Overall, the power and functionality present in the 7200 series routers is certainly worth the investment. Ciscos new 7200 is a worthwhile new take on an already solid platform.
Cisco Supercharges the Performance of the Cisco 7200 Series Router, One of the Industry's Most Widely Deployed Mid-Range Routers
Cisco Systems, Inc., today announced it has more than doubled the processing power of its Cisco 7200 Series routers, bringing million-packets-per-second (mpps) processing to one of the industry's most widely deployed mid-range routers via the new Cisco 7200 Series Network Processing Engine (NPE-G1). The NPE-G1 can also be installed in the field as an incremental upgrade to any Cisco 7200 VXR chassis. This leap in processing power will help enable both enterprises and service providers to continue to deploy the Cisco 7200 Series for a wide range of applications and services while lowering the total cost of ownership and preserving customers' investment in existing Cisco equipment.
"With the planned deployment of the new NPE-G1 processing engine within our existing IP/MPLS network, Cisco continues to work to ensure that our network is capable of meeting the growing demand for high-performance service delivery," said Christian Hammerl, head of product and technology development at Telekom Austria. "This innovation for our installed Cisco 7200 base will contribute to our cost-effective network migration and is the basis to deliver high-touch services such as MPLS VPNs with QoS and managed security to our customers."
The introduction of the NPE-G1 engine enables significantly higher performance implementations for security services, bandwidth and traffic management (QoS), converged voice, video and data, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and IPv6. In addition, the NPE-G1 offers three built-in 10/100/1000-Mbps Ethernet ports for high-speed LAN connectivity; further increasing the value and flexibility of the Cisco 7200 Series routers.
"In today's economy, both enterprise and service provider customers are looking for ways to incrementally invest to improve the network's effectiveness and expand its capabilities," said Lele Nardin, vice president and general manager, Mid-Range Routing at Cisco Systems. "The NPE-G1 for the Cisco 7200 Series is a simple, immediate and cost-effective way to add significant new capabilities and performance, as well as protect investments. Service providers gain additional profit potential from new services, and enterprise customers get the flexibility to deploy more sophisticated applications. The Cisco 7200 Series, with an installed base of 250,000 units deployed worldwide, continues to set the pace in the mid-range router segment with industry-leading price and performance, features and interface breadth."
Further building upon its mid-range router leadership, Cisco also announced new software support for hardware-accelerated features on its Cisco 7300 Series routers such as MPLS, MPLS VPNs, and Network Address Translation (NAT), making this the platform of choice for high-end customer premise equipment (CPE) and service provider remote point-of-presence (POP) applications. The Cisco 7300 Series is ideal for applications demanding mid-range routing performance with multi-gigabit optical connectivity.
For more information about Cisco 7200 Series routers, please visit http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/rt/7200.
For more information about Cisco 7300 Series Internet routers, please visit http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/rt/7300rts.
Pricing and Availability
The Cisco 7200 Series Network Processing Engine (NPE-G1) is currently available and list priced at $15,000.
The new software features for the Cisco 7300 Series Internet Router are currently available.
About Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. News and information are available at www.cisco.com.
Cisco, Cisco Systems, and the Cisco Systems logo are registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.
Cisco Injects Old 7200 with New Power
New core modules let admins upgrade routers without unracking
It’s not terribly often that hardware vendors are so forward-thinking that they can retrofit a whole new class of hardware into an existing chassis. Cisco Systems, however, seems to be able to do this with ease. The new Cisco 7200 router is a perfect example.
The 7000-series core routers have been the mainstays of ISP and large MAN/WAN deployments for decades. The now-deceased Cisco 7010 could be found at the core of nearly every ISP in the mid-’90s, boasting 10Mb Ethernet ports and the ability to handle HSSI (high-speed serial interface) and traditional T1/T3 services in a modular fashion. The later models in the same series, such as the 7500 and 7600, built on that base to deliver more horsepower and more high-speed connectivity options within a large-footprint modular chassis.
The 7200, first introduced several years ago, was the middle of the road. With high-speed modules dropping in size, it became possible to fit much more into a much smaller space. The 7202, 7204, and 7206 represented three variations on a common theme: A modular workhorse router that could grow with the needs of the infrastructure.
The “new” 7200-series is the latest example of that capability, taking the 7200 to places it’s never been before. Rather than introducing a completely new router series, Cisco has simply released new core modules for the existing 7200 routers, resulting in the ability to do wholesale upgrades to existing routers without unracking anything.
This collection of new gear for the 7200 series is aimed at companies looking to leverage their existing hardware in new ways, such as high-bandwidth VPN aggregation. The new 7200VXR NPE-G2 (Network Processing Engine) promises twice the performance of the existing NPE, and the VSA (VPN Services Adapter) provides encryption offloading to kick those VPN tunnels into high gear. Not only are these modules now available, but with the new Port Adapter Jacket Card, some new features can be implemented without reducing the available slot count on existing 7200 routers.
Starting at the top, the new NPE-G2 offers some serious horsepower. Leveraging 1GB of SDRAM and 256MB of onboard flash, it has three built-in gigabit Ethernet ports, one fast Ethernet port, and two USB ports. The gigabit Ethernet ports are all dual-personality, and can be ordered as either copper/GBIC or copper/SFP, which lets admins leverage existing hardware in the upgrade, or at least defer the cost of GBICs with lower-cost SFP optics. With the new NPE, Cisco has the ability to offer much more than just simple routing capabilities in the 7200. Their services matrix for this router runs from firewalling and IPS duties to VPN end point termination, to voice, video, QoS, and multicast routing tasks, all within the same box. In short, they’re trying to fit the 7200 into nearly every corner of the network, either all-in-one, or a la carte, and with notable success.
I had two Cisco 7206 routers in the lab, equipped with the new NPE-G2 as well as the VSA module. The testing I conducted was based around high-speed VPN configurations, basically AES and 3DES VPNs running at gigabit speeds between the routers. To drive all the testing, I relied on a Spirent SmartBits chassis with a few gigabit interfaces to generate traffic through the VPN constructed between the two 7206 routers. Cisco’s VPN performance claims were well founded, with my results showing just under wire-speed gigabit IPSec VPN operation between the two routers. Even without the VPN in place, I was able to achieve just under wire-rate throughout the testing, with a max of 960Mb throughput.
As with nearly every mid- to high-end Cisco device, proper configuration and maintenance can be a challenge for the uninitiated. It’s certainly not something to be done casually, nor without the proper training and experience. Cisco IOS has long been the bane as well as the savior of networking. Hideously complex in places, and obscenely powerful and configurable in others, it’s the stuff of legend. Just trying to navigate through the Cisco Web site’s software support matrix to determine the proper IOS version and sub-version for a specific piece of hardware can be trying, not to mention the half-dozen or so authentication requests as you navigate through the process. High-end internetworking has never been, nor is ever likely to be simple, but sometimes it seems that Cisco’s being purposefully obtuse in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Cisco’s attempts at providing GUI tools for their hardware has never really produced a workable mid-range solution, although the Cisco Network Assistant (CNA) application for switched infrastructures does a fairly decent job of simplifying common administration tasks such as VLAN port assignments without requiring the massive financial and physical resources needed to implement their high-end CiscoWorks suite. CNA doesn’t support the devices at the top of the Cisco food chain, such as the Catalyst 6509 or the 7200 routers. Cisco has been pushing SDM (Security Device Manager), a new GUI for their higher-end devices, however, and the 7200 is supported for basic routing configurations as well as advanced features such as firewall, VPN, QoS, and IPS configurations. This is a relatively new step for Cisco, and a good one, although it will certainly be eschewed by Cisco CLI gurus.
Overall, the power and functionality present in the 7200 series routers is certainly worth the investment. Cisco’s “new” 7200 is a worthwhile new take on an already solid platform.