SAN JOSE, Calif., January 12, 1998 - Cisco Systems, Inc. today announced the Cisco 12008 Gigabit Switch Router (GSR). The Cisco 12008 enhances the Cisco 12000 product family by giving network designers a broader selection of multi-gigabit routers and greater flexibility when building high-speed networks. The Cisco 12008 also gives service providers, cable operators and enterprise customers Internet features and services in a carrier-class platform to ensure maximum uptime and minimum disruption to user traffic.
"A major challenge that network designers face today is the seamless migration of an IP-based network to gigabit rates," said Graeme Fraser, vice president of engineering for Cisco Systems' Internet Service Provider Business Unit. "The Cisco 12008 is the answer for network designers seeking ever-increasing backbone capacity. Optimized for WAN links that operate at OC-3/STM-1 (155 Mbps) speeds and above, the Cisco 12008 integrates bandwidth-efficient packet interfaces that allow for easy migration to gigabit networking."
The compact, integrated OC-48 (2.4 Gbps) switching fabric of the Cisco 12008 scales from 10 Gbps to 40 Gbps and maximizes network performance while minimizing use of precious rack and floor space. Redundancy in all key system components minimizes network disruptions if a failure occurs. The Cisco 12008 extends the family of gigabit switch routers which also includes the Cisco 12012 with switching capacity from 15 Gbps to 60 Gbps, and the Cisco 12004 with a switching capacity of 5 Gbps.
"The Cisco 12008 is another example of Cisco's ability to meet the demands of the growing ISP market," said Steven Blumenthal, vice president, engineering, GTE Internetworking. "We've been working with Cisco as part of our strategic partnership and communicating our needs for reliable, high-speed routers that meet the growing demands of the ISP industry, including an economical 'footprint' within our POPs. The Cisco 12008 meets our performance and reliability needs as well as our space and power constraints. GTE Internetworking looks forward to continuing our partnership with Cisco to meet the ever-increasing requirements of this market."
Internet traffic volumes are rapidly increasing, driven by the World Wide Web, networked commerce, multimedia and new voice-based applications. The Cisco 12008 meets the Internet bandwidth requirements of both service providers and large enterprise customers by bringing scalable, high-performance services to IP-based networks at OC-3 (155 Mbps) rates and above. Designed to meet current and future Internet traffic requirements, the Cisco 12008 also integrates high-density, high-speed, Packet-Over-Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) connections. Integration of Packet-over-SONET/SDH connections allows the Cisco 12008 to send native IP packets across standard SONET/SDH equipment. This feature enables a service provider or enterprise customer to attach the Cisco 12008 directly to a high-speed fiber-based infrastructure to provide superior bandwidth utilization and efficiency over other transport methods.
The Cisco 12008 embeds Cisco IOS™ software to deliver capabilities to support IP quality of service (QoS). Scalable network services such as QoS and class of service (CoS) enable traffic engineers to increase network utilization and create a platform to offer differentiated class-of-service models. The scalable performance of the Cisco 12008 enables customers to dramatically expand backbone capacity within a single platform, avoiding costs often associated with purchasing additional products in order to scale beyond OC-12/STM-4 rates. The Cisco 12008 initially supports IP backbone links at OC-3/STM-1 (155 Mbps) and OC-12/STM-4 (622 Mbps) and scales to handle links up to OC-48/STM-16 (2.4 Gbps).
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