“Computing and networking could merge”

Sharat Sinha Director, Foundation Technologies, Asia Pacific, Cisco Systems (USA) Pte

Cisco continues to push the envelope in its core routing and switching business with its ‘wire-speed’ ISR family of integrated routers and the CRS-1 that was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the highest capacity Internet router ever developed.

*The CRS-1 was supposed to be Cisco’s behemoth router for telcos. What is the progress report on that?

Trials of the CRS-1 are on with 8 to 10 of our large APAC customers in China, Australia and Korea.

*Is the ISR range only going to consist of entry-level and mid-range products?

While deploying IP telephony in an enterprise environment, the head office will need a separate call manager for IP telephony. In a large enterprise environment you don’t want to create a single point of failure. So an integrated solution may not be ideal for them. For a service provider a product like his lets them turn on services as needed at the customer premises.

*The ISR is said to run at wire-speed. How do you optimise the router family’s performance vis-a-vis your conventional routers?

If you implement security in software, systems become applications-heavy. Having more applications slows down the router. In the ISR, security and IP telephony are implemented as embedded hardware in the ASIC on the router’s motherboard.

*Are switching and routing still distinct functions?

The basic functionality of a switch remains at Layer 2. Take the 6500 switch; it has security, content switching and network applications. That’s Layer 2 plus a lot of other things. The 7600 router has the same basic architecture as the 6500 switch. The ISRs switch boards function at Layer 2. If you add a blade it becomes a router. The way things are moving, computing devices and networking devices are converging and the margin between them is decreasing. You have blades in servers and blades on a switch. Depending upon the application you use a server on a network [or put a blade in a switch to perform a similar function]. The way things are going, computing and networking could merge.

*What verticals and applications will drive the networking market?

In manufacturing, process control has moved from pneumatic to electrical to networked controls. Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) and BPO are huge. New applications are emerging. In Hong Kong you have movies being streamed over broadband networks.

Prashant L Rao