9/21/2004 -- Cisco Systems Inc. unveiled a new line of routers designed specifically for the SMB space and featuring integrated data, voice, video and other services.

Cisco’s new 1800 Series, 2800 Series and 3800 Series routers feature built-in VPN hardware encryption and acceleration, Cisco Router and Security Device Manager (SDM) 2.0, and an IOS-based VPN firewall -- along with an inline intrusion prevention system (IPS).

In addition, the new routers feature integrated encryption silicon, while the voice-enabled routers ship with dedicated DSP slots to support the offloading of advanced telephony services. What’s more, Cisco says the 2800 and 3800 series routers have been certified for specific line-rate performance with all IP services enabled by Miercom.

According to Joel Conover, a principal analyst for enterprise infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis Inc., the new 1800, 2800, and 3800 series address two of Cisco’s most glaring shortcomings in the SMB space -- performance and service density. “This is particularly true in the voice-capable 2800 and 3800 series, where Cisco has added many additional expansion options in addition to boosting the performance of the data portion of the system,” he observes.

Cisco is also executing well under pressure, says Conover, as it has introduced the 1800, 2800, and 3800 in a timely enough manner to respond to similar moves from competitors Juniper Networks and 3Com. Cisco continues to charge a premium price for its SMB routers, Conover concedes, but that isn’t necessarily a problem: “Cisco has done a good job of justifying its ‘premium’ pricing with these products, delivering multiple new services and voice capabilities that differentiate its routers from the competition.”

In fact, Conover says, the new routers offer major performance improvements -- as much as 500 to 700 percent -- over their predecessors.

All’s not completely peachy, however. Cisco’s 1800, 2800, and 3800 series serve as a launch pad for many of the new features Cisco plans to deliver in IOS version 12.3, says Conover, and this highlights one of the issues Cisco is dealing with in SMB space. “For Cisco, every product launch is a compromise between the newest features and backwards compatibility,” he writes. “Cisco has introduced new technology and faster performing routers, but Cisco also had to remain true to IOS, restricting the architectural changes that Cisco could make to the routers. Thus the 1800, 2800, and 3800 are still architecturally single CPU devices built on a monolithic operating system.”

Competitors like Juniper can afford to take a different approach, such that (Juniper, for example) is able to tout support for a dedicated control plane for router traffic, or a modular operating system, or a single software release train. “[These] are concerns that Cisco simply cannot address without a radical change to its underlying operating system,” Conover concludes. “On the flip side, Cisco has managed to stay ahead of the competition through innovation -- continually adding and improving on features that differentiate the Cisco platform from everything else in the market.” -Stephen Swoyer