12/21/2004 -- Earlier this month, Cisco Systems touted new customer trials and several successful deployments of its next-generation Carrier Routing System, the CRS-1. The networking giant also announced an eight-slot, single-shelf version of the CRS-1 with a starting list price of $225,000. Analysts say the news amounts to a validation of Cisco’s Carrier Routing System vision.

New customer deployments include SoftBank BB Corp—better known as Yahoo! BB in Japan—as well as the research networks for the National Institute of Informatics’ SuperSINET in Japan and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Prominent customer trials include EU telecommunications giant Telecom Italia, along with 14 unnamed service providers.

On the product side, the new eight-slot, 19-inch rack-mountable edition of the CRS-1 lowers the bar for entry to Cisco’s high-end CRS line. “[It] drastically lowers the entry-level price and logistics to deploy a product that can scale from 640 Gbps to 92 terabits of throughput,” says Jeff Ogle, a principal analyst for carrier infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis, Inc.

What it all adds up to, Ogle says, is encouraging news about Cisco’s unprecedented CRS-1, which the networking giant announced last May. “[T]he announcements show true market traction and product acceptance for its new next-generation core router,” Ogle writes. “The CRS-1 eight-slot, single-shelf system is equally important because its gives Cisco a platform to more directly compete head-to-head with the Juniper Networks terabit core routing platform.”

This isn’t to say that we’re likely to see a rash of new CRS-1 deployments, of course. “The CRS-1 is still very new in terms of product life cycle and network deployments, and as such, there remains a higher level of risk for customers wishing to deploy it over the more tried and true products that have several years of hardening based upon large network deployments,” he notes.

And while the CRS-1 deployments and new customers trials are encouraging, Cisco must still do more, Ogle says: “Although the announcement included several key and major customers ... Cisco has yet to announce a major deployment with a Tier 1 service provider or ILEC for the CRS-1.”

Similarly, Cisco’s IOS XR—the revamped version of IOS that powers its CRS routers—almost certainly lacks some of the features IOS users are familiar with. “Subsequent releases will be required to bring the two operating systems more together on feature parity as well as the inevitable code fixes required to harden the product,” he writes.

On the plus side, however, Ogle sees a lot to like. “This announcement gives Cisco a better platform to go up against Juniper’s T640, the only other major core router to hold significant market share in this space,” he points out.

Elsewhere, the CRS-1 eight-slot, single-shelf system is exactly 50 percent of the cost ($225,000) of the high-end CRS-1 ($450,000), which could translate into more uptake over the next several months. And then there’s space and logistics, which are the twin banes of networking providers everywhere. “Having a standard [19-inch] rack mountable half-rack version of the CRS-1 will provide a better fit both physically and economically to those carriers and service providers requiring a footprint for the smaller PoPs within their networks,” Ogle concludes. -Stephen Swoyer