Cisco overhauls Ethernet edge routers

Cisco ASR 9000 designed for 6.4Tbps, video and mobile backhaul

By Jim Duffy , Network World , 11/11/2008

Cisco as expected this week ushered in the new era of its Carrier Ethernet routers with an edge system designed to scale to 6.4Tbps.

The ASR 9000 builds on the ASR series and QuantumFlow processor announced earlier this year. It cost $200 million and was in development for more than four years. The box runs Cisco's IOS-XR operating system with edge-specific enhancements, and is expected to succeed the company's eight-year-old and widely installed 7600 series systems.

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ASR 9000 is designed for a subscriber and enterprise world of increasing video and mobile service use. According to Cisco, IP traffic over wireline and mobile networks will nearly double every two years until 2012, reaching 522 exabytes -- an exabyte is a billion gigabytes – or the equivalent of downloading 125 billion DVD movies per month.

Video will prompt consumer IP traffic to quadruple in that time, while mobile data will grow at a compounded annual rate of 125%, Cisco says. The scale of videro growth mandates 100+Gbps of bandwidth and video intelligence, the company says.

The ASR 9000 comes in six- and 10-slot configurations and Cisco says they support 400Gbps per slot. The 7600 is aimed squarely at Carrier Ethernet aggregation and mobile backhaul applications requiring up to 80Gbps per slot. (Compare access router products.)

Cisco did not discuss interface modules for the ASR 9000 chassis, and would not comment when asked if it would ship prestandard 40/100Gbps Ethernet line cards for them; but the routers will support integrated optical transponders, or Cisco's IP-over-dense-wavelength-division-multiplexing technology for increasing fiber capacity.

They will also support seamless mobile handoff capabilities with 3G/4G cell site routers, Cisco says.

At 6.4Tbps, Cisco says the ASR 9000 provide six times the capacity of competitive edge routers, which include Juniper's MX960, Alcatel-Lucent's 7750 and Ericsson's Redback SmartEdge. The routers also incorporates an Advanced Video Services Module (AVSM) designed to provide terabytes of streaming capacity while simultaneously offering content caching, ad insertion, fast channel change and error correction.

AVSM eliminates the need for standalone content delivery network elements, Cisco says. Errors can be retransmitted in milliseconds to a Cisco set-top box to maintain a transparent visual experience with no TV screen "freeze," the company says.

IT admin used inside knowledge to hack and steal

According to the Santa Clara District Attorney's office, Andrew Madrid, 34, used his IT experience to pull off a variety of crimes between September 2006 and March 2008.

"This was one of the most sophisticated computer crimes our office has prosecuted," said Ben Field, Santa Clara's deputy district attorney. "There's computer intrusion in the first place, there's the introduction of spyware, there's the theft of proprietary data from a computer network, and sometimes the destruction of proprietary data from a computer network."

One of Madrid's victims was his former employer, a Sunnyvale, Calif., high-technology company. According to Field, Madrid destroyed data on the company's servers in the hope that "they would ask him to come back and fix the very problem that he created."

The Santa Clara District Attorney's office declined to name any of the victims of Madrid's crimes.

To make his hacking harder to trace, Madrid would often use his neighbor's open wireless networks, Field said.

Posing as a security guard or an IT person, he also breezed through Bay Area companies late at night looking for laptops and other computer equipment to steal, Field said. "He had a good eye for what was valuable," he said.

He sometimes gained access to different parts of the building by picking up security badges he found lying in unoccupied cubes, Field said.

If stopped by company employees, "he would talk to them as if he was completely justified in being there," Field said. "Like he was an IT person doing some work or a security guard making sure the place was secure."

"Being a former network administrator, he could talk the talk as an IT guy," he added.

Madrid even wore clothes that resembled a security guard's uniform, Field said.

In another scheme, Madrid would change bar-code tags on computer equipment in stores in order to pay retailers less than the value of their merchandise. He sometimes manufactured his own price tags, Field said, and a mobile bar-code printer was found in his car. Sometimes the scam was as simple as taking the bar code off a cheap eMachine and putting it on a more expensive Hewlett-Packard computer, Field said.

Madrid pleaded guilty on Friday in Santa Clara superior court. He faces six to 12 years in prison on the various charges. Sentencing is set for Jan. 22.