The New ASR1001-HX—The Most Powerful Compact Service Router

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In this article, we will introduce the new member of Cisco ASR 1000 family—the ASR1001-HX. What kind of it?

(The ASR 1000 Series includes seven models: the 1-rack-unit (1RU) ASR 1001-X, ASR 1001-HX, the 2RU ASR 1002-X, ASR 1002-HX, the 4RU ASR 1004, the 6RU ASR 1006 and ASR 1006-X, the 9RU ASR 1009-X, and the 13RU ASR 1013.)

The ASR 1001-HX Router supports software redundancy without redundant hardware, just like Cisco ASR 1001-X, 1002-X, 1002-HX, and 1004 Routers. It is ideal for WAN aggregation or Internet edge devices, or managed services.

For starter, the ‘H’ in ASR1001-HX represents ‘High-end’; so, it is a high-end, fixed platform with the same 1RU form-factor. ASR1001-X is max’d at 20Gbps performance and ASR1002-X at 36Gbps, while ASR1001-HX starts at 44Gbps; in essence, ASR1001-HX is designed to address the market where multiple 10GE interfaces are required as providers are moving from 1GE to 10GE circuits to accommodate the ever-increasing bandwidth needs due to high bandwidth consuming applications such as video and social media. Secondly, ASR1001-HX is designed to handle Ethernet based interfaces only; the ASR1001-X and ASR1002-X, on the other hand, support SPAs with legacy interfaces such as POS, ATM, T1/E1, T3/E3, etc. In short, ASR1001-X and ASR1002-X are here to stay.

Now, let’s dive right into the ASR1001-HX and explore what this router can do for you. With consolidated control plane (Route Processor), data plane (Forwarding Processors), and built-in 10GE/1GE interfaces architecture, ASR1001-HX is equipped with these powerful components and capabilities:

Intel Gladden quad core running at 2.5 GHz–only one core is currently used as control plane; the remaining 3 are not utilized, making them perfect candidates for applications such as container, application hosting, even for 3^rd party applications.
Either dual-AC or dual-DC or dual-HVDC Power Supplies (future), hot-swappable and FRU-able from Back panel, providing 1+1 redundancy for Power Supplies (PEMs)
FRU-able crypto module (not hot swappable), coupled with “pay-as-you-grow” crypto performance upgradable licenses, it provides 8Gbps or 16Gbps crypto (IMIX) performance; for large (1400B) packets, it can deliver up to 29Gbps crypto performance; best of all, you only pay for up to 16Gbps crypto performance; anything above that, you get it for free
Suite-B encryption is also supported for diverse VPN security solutions.
Single Yoda ASIC, the 2^nd generation Cisco QFP technology which is the heart of the ASR1001-HX data plane, containing 62 packet processing engines, each engine can have 4 processing threads; this means the ASR1001-HX can process 62 * 4 = 248 packets simultaneously, providing 30+ MPPS (Million Packets Per-Second) forwarding with universal k9 baseline feature set, yielding 60Gbps+ total system output performance for IPv4 & IPv6
Supports up to 88 Gbps (8x10GE + 8x1GE built-in ports) input traffic into the system; obviously the system is oversubscribed in this case; however, just like all other existing platforms within ASR1000 product family, ASR1001-HX is designed to handle oversubscription with classification and scheduling engine
In case you are not aware, out of the 16 built-in ports, 4 of them can be configured as either 10GE or 1GE, providing additional level of flexibility for future growth if you need to move from 1GE interface to 10GE interface
MACSec is also supported on each of the 16 built-in 10GE or 1GE ports, providing point-to-point and/or point-to-multipoint connection support for DCI, Campus interconnect, and Hop-Spoke deployment topology
With default 8GB memory, upgradable to 16GB, the ASR1001-HX can scale up to 3.5 million IPv4 or IPv6 routes
2 million Firewall or traditional NAT Sessions can be achieved at linerate, generating 60Gbps FW/NAT performance
Even if you were to use it as an AVC (Application Visibility Control, which is our term for DPI – Deep Packet Inspection) appliance, the ASR1001-HX can achieve up to 30Gbps performance
When used as BNG, this 1RU form-factor router can terminate up to 29,000 BB sessions, plus 16,000 L2TP tunnels
Last but not least, ASR1001-HX also supports IOS software redundancy without redundant hardware, just like the rest of existing ASR1001-X, 1002-X, 1002-HX, and 1004 routers.

With its built-in four 10-GE ports, eight 1-GE ports, and four configurable 10-GE / 1-GE ports, up to 60Gbps total system bandwidth, and the instant-on service capabilities and on-demand crypto capability up to 29 Gbps (1400B), the ASR 1001-HX is ideal for: