At CiscoLive this week, I am proud to announce the launch of the new Aggregation Services Router, the ASR 1001-X.

The ASR 1001-X is the latest addition to the ASR 1000 family of routers that packs 20Gbps forwarding capacity and 8G of Layer 3 Crypto throughput in a compact 1RU form factor!

In my earlier blog post I highlighted the need for connecting data centers to share and scale cloud services on demand and achieve flexibility and availability that is required by the cloud. As data centers continue to grow so does the need for more power and cooling, while rackspace continues to become a rare commodity. Talking to customers they wanted a platform with a smaller footprint but with higher performance and hence the ASR 1001-X was born. 

Some of the key benefits of the ASR 1001-X we are highlighting at CiscoLive are:

• Investment Protection:Pay-as-you-grow forwarding throughput upgradable from 2.5 to 5,10 and 20Gbps
• Robust Security:Up to 8Gbps of Suite-B encryption combined with Layer 2 MAC Security.
• Data Center Interconnect (DCI):For workload mobility, high-availability application clusters and layer 2 extension for legacy applications support.
• Cisco IWAN:Application Visibility and Control, AppNav and Performance Routing enable inexpensive business-class Internet links as a WAN transport
• Advanced Routing:Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) to enable Host mobility, Ingress traffic load-balancing, high VPN scale, and IPv6 transition
• Route Reflector:Up to 13M IPv4 routes (selective download)
• Multimedia Edge:Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) Enterprise Edition to offer 16k calls
• Ease of Management:Seamless integration and management with Cisco Prime Infrastructure.

I am often asked how each one of the benefits will help our customers so I wanted to talk about some of the common use cases where customers will see the largest benefit of the ASR 1001-X. For this blog I will cover in detail the Data Center Interconnect (DCI) use case and I will cover more use cases in future blog posts.

The Data Center Interconnect must provide secure access to satisfy a key requirement for the consumption of services from the cloud. Before the advent of the cloud, the network traffic that flowed in the interconnecting network fabric or the IP NGN was unidirectional -it flowed from the client to the server in the network and back to the network client. Cloud and virtualization has made the network traffic multi-dimensional. The network traffic not only moves to and from client and network server it can also move across servers that are located in geographically dispersed data centers that are interconnected using DCI technologies. VMware virtual machine motion is an example of that. Based on this criteria, the ASR 1001-X supports the following DCI technologies:

• Virtual Extensible LAN Services
• Overlay Transport Virtualization
• Virtual Private LAN Services
• Ethernet over MPLS
• Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol v3

Please stay tuned for more in my next blog. I will talk about how the consumers of the cloud require the same great application experience when services are moved to the cloud and how the ASR 1001-X can help to deliver a better user experience.