Cisco Improves Upon the 7200 Series

Paula Bernier

Cisco Systems Inc. today at INTEROP announced a slew of upgrades that multiply the performance and bandwidth of its popular 7200 Series Routers, which has seen 330,000 installations worldwide.

“The most important thing [about the 7200 enhancements] is you’re able to do them as an in place upgrade,” said Robert Checketts, Cisco’s senior manager for routing product marketing, “so very little downtime and there’s no need to learn anything new about the platform.”

The new Cisco 7200 Network Processing Engine (NPE-G2) is an engine replacement for the Cisco 7200VXR chassis that doubles the performance for multiple services on the router. Additional features include threat defense, secure VPN connectivity, network admission control and voice/IP-to-IP gateway functions. Available this month, the NPE is list priced at $19,000.

The new Cisco 7200 VPN Services Adapter (VSA) is a VPN hardware acceleration module that triples the 7200 performance when combined with the Cisco 7200 NPE-G2 card to support large-scale IPsec aggregation and more secure Cisco IOS Software connectivity. VSA will be available starting in the second half of this year and will be list priced at $15,000.

The Cisco 7200 Port Adapter Jacket Card, meanwhile, increases the 7200’s slot density so it can hold a single port adapter for additional capacity on systems with the NPEs. This card, list priced at $1,250, boosts the bits per second throughput of the systems by 50 percent and is available now.

Many enterprises today use 7200s to aggregate traffic from remote and home offices to their corporate headquarters. Service providers also use the 7200 line to support security, VoIP and other services on a managed service basis for their business customers. Stefan Dyckerhoff, director of Cisco’s mid-range routing business unit, said the 7200 has always been known as a Swiss Army Knife of applications because of its versatility.

Cisco Systems Inc. www.cisco.com