 Cisco
7500 Series Routers
New and Used Cisco Routers
The rapid expansion of the Internet has fundamentally changed the way
organizations conduct business. With this growth, enterprise customers
are seeking higher bandwidth aggregation of WAN links to the Internet.
Likewise the service provider community is faced with meeting the
continued demand from consumers for Internet access. These factors are
driving service provider and enterprise customers to solutions that
optimize network density, bandwidth aggregation, availability,
serviceability, and operational costs.
The high-performance Cisco 7500 Series Router remains the market leader
due to its breadth of advanced support for LAN/WAN services, redundancy,
reliability, and performance.
A distributed architecture using Versatile Interface Processors (VIPs)
is the key to the Cisco 7500's scalability. Each VIP has its own
processor, which is capable of switching IP data packets and providing
network services. This scenario allows the overall system performance of
Cisco 7500 routers to scale up when they need to handle more high-speed
network connections and more data packets. The RSP is still the master
of the system. It runs routing protocols with other routers in the
network to gather switching intelligence, which is then downloaded to
the VIPs so that each can switch IP packets on its own.
In addition to performing packet switching, the VIPs can also provide a
set of distributed IP network services, including access control, QoS,
and traffic accounting (NetFlow). With the VIPs off-loading these IP
switching and service functions from the RSP, the RSP can devote all its
CPU cycles to handle other essential tasks. VIP distributed switching is
the way to scale up system performance, and should be enabled where
possible, to significantly reduce CPU utilization on the RSP.
Since its launch, the Cisco 7500 Series router has seen huge
improvements in performance and its ability to scale. Alongside a
widened number of interfaces (port adapters) for both LAN and WAN
connectivity, the latest high end RSP8 CPU, and VIP4 module mean that
the platform continues to deliver market leading performance.
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