11/11/2008 -- Earlier this year, Cisco Systems Inc. introduced its Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 1000, the product that cost $250 million in research and development efforts, according to Cisco's estimates.

Last week, Cisco trumpeted a new and improved version of the ASR 1000, just months after it announced its first-ever ASR offering.

Cisco's first ASR 1000 units shipped with 5 and 10 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) embedded services processors (ESPs). Its newest ASR deliverable ships with a 20 Gbps ESP, which lets it achieve double the service processing rate of its predecessor. Elsewhere, the Cisco 20 Gbps ESP supports hardware-assisted policing, a high-speed IPsec encryption facility (maxing out at 8 Gbps), as well as jitter- and latency-minimizing multicast packet replication capabilities. It can support up to 10,000 VPN tunnel services, according to Cisco.

Officials said the newest ASR, like its predecessors, lets customers do more with less -- in this case, by replacing discrete devices with an all-in-one box.

"Global enterprises are benefiting from the ASR 1000 Series Router's enhanced level of security and attack prevention without having to compromise on performance," said Stefan Dyckerhoff, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Edge Routing business unit, in a statement.

The newest ASR, like its predecessors, also incorporates Session Border Control (SBC) capabilities. However, these features leave something to be desired, according to industry watchers. The original ASR 1000 units, for example, didn't support the 3GPP standard for IPsec encryption/decryption; they also lacked features that are standard items in standalone SBCs, such as protection for internal infrastructure gear from Layer 5 (SIP) DoS attacks.

Nonetheless, analysts have been intrigued by Cisco's ASR gambit, which -- in combination with similar (if less ambitious) moves by several other players -- could simplify things for customers and complicate matteres for standalone or best-of-breed competitors.

"The Cisco ASR 1000 Series is first and foremost a powerful router in a small platform," said Joe McGarvey, a principal analyst for carrier telephony with Current Analysis, at the time. He predicted tough times for SBC vendors, in particular. "[T]he actions of Cisco and other router makers to duplicate the functionality of standalone SBCs threaten the continued existence of those products," McGarvey said. "The delivery of the ASR...is a powerful reminder to the much smaller standalone companies that inhabit the SBC market of Cisco's deep pockets. The product announcement demonstrates that Cisco has almost unlimited resources to throw at the SBC product category if it decides that such a pursuit is in its overall strategic interest." --Stephen Swoyer