4/1/2008 -- Next month, Cisco Systems Inc.'s CRS-1 -- short for "Carrier Routing System 1" (or "Huge Fast Router," as Cisco insiders once deemed it) -- turns four. And Cisco got an early start on CRS-1's birthday festivities this week, touting an impressive growth spurt that it says is proof positive that CRS-1 is having an impact.

When Cisco announced CRS-1 four years ago, it was by far the biggest and brawniest router on the planet. Four years on, CRS-1's brawniness remains essentially unchallenged. And as service providers increasingly transition to triple-play configurations -- simultaneously serving up data, voice and video -- a beefy router like CRS-1 becomes even more attractive.

That's Cisco's spin on things, anyway. And, if CRS-1's surging sales numbers can be believed, the networking giant might just be on to something. According to Cisco, total worldwide cumulative shipments of CRS-1 have doubled in less than nine months, rising from a total of just 900 as of June 2007 to more than 1,800 units shipped through March of this year.

"Exponential traffic growth on the Internet -- driven largely by increased deployment of video services -- is causing more and more providers to rethink their core architectures," said Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics Research, in a statement.

Enter CRS-1, which, compared to competitive solutions, is just a much brawnier alternative.

"Highly scalable, reliable and intelligent core platforms such as the Cisco CRS-1 help providers meet their needs, as business and residential consumers demand more video content in increasingly personalized bundles," Howard said.

And if Cisco's Global IP Traffic Forecast can be believed, the future's even brighter for CRS-1. Three years from now, the networking giant predicts, Internet video traffic will be 20 times bigger than it was in 2006, while Internet traffic (largely driven by surging video-over-IP implementations) will quadruple over the same period. --Stephen Swoyer