Cisco 7500 Series

Setting New Standards for High-End Internetworking Much has been said in the industry over the last 12 months about the continuing role that routers will play as ATM and LAN switching technologies continue to emerge. Perhaps the Gartner Group1 exposed the prevailing misconception best in a recent research note: "`Switch where you can, route only when necessary' is a thinly veiled attempt to bring about the death of routing. Although there are a number of marketing and political reasons forcing these switch vendors to take such a stand, the compelling technical evidence proves this battle cry is shortsighted, hollow, and misleading."

While ATM and LAN switching both have important roles to play, routing continues to be essential in building highly available and scalable networks. Routers provide the security, stability, and control needed for mission-critical enterprise networks. Moreover, an emerging set of applications and environments are expanding the boundaries of high-end routing.

These include such applications as:

• Switched virtual LANs (VLANs), where the requirement for routing is shifting from routing between physical segments to routing between logical virtual LANs.
• Networked multimedia with its requirement for quality of service and high-performance advanced queuing techniques
• IBM networking and the continued integration of SNA and NetBIOS with TCP/IP and the functional offload of mainframes and front-end processors (FEPs)
• Bandwidth-hungry client/server applications and high-speed WAN services
• Internet access and its requirement for density and security
• Internet core requirements where the explosive growth of the world's Internet continues to drive high-performance routing

In addition, routers will increasingly perform value-add functions such as compression and encryption, again increasing the routing power needed to solve these emerging and growing application areas.

Product Overview