The heart of the ASR 1000 is the QuantumFlow Processor. A highly dense custom ASIC providing up to 100Gpbs (up to 20Gbps in the ASR series routers) of packet processing bandwidth. This allows the entire payload and headers of frames to be processed by the chip, accelerating Deep Packet Inspection and application-specific processing.

The Cisco ASR 1000 series is available in different packaging options, differentiated by the number of I/O slots, capacity, redundancy, and power:

• Cisco ASR 1002 (2-rack-unit [2RU] chassis with the modular Cisco ASR 1000 Series Embedded Services Processor [ESP] and fixed Cisco ASR 1000 Series RP1 and Cisco ASR 1000 Series SPA Interface Processor [SIP] with 4 built-in Gigabit Ethernet ports)

• Cisco ASR 1004 (4RU chassis with modular ESP, route processor, and SIPs)

• Cisco ASR 1006 (6RU chassis with modular and redundant ESPs, route processor, and SIPs for SPA connectivity)

As the above list shows, only the ASR 1006 allows the use of redundant forwarding planes (ESPs) and route processors.

Two different ESPs will be available: ESP-5G and ESP-10G. The performance of the ESP is the core factor for all high-touch services provided on the ASR platform, including:

• IPsec
• QoS
• NBAR (Network Based Application Recognition)
• GRE
• Firewall
• Full and Sampled NetFlow

QoS is supported at multigigabit rates without any significant degradation to other data plane-bounded functions, and no degradation to control plane-related features.

The linecards used in the ASR 1000 are the already familiar SPAs. Following is the complete list of SPAs that are supported at platform first customer shipment (FCS):

• 8-port Gigabit Ethernet
• 1-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet
• 2-, 5-, and 10-port Gigabit Ethernet
• 8-port Fast Ethernet
• 8-port T1/E1
• 2- and 4-port T3/E3
• 2- and 4-port OC-3/STM-1 Packet over SONET/SDH (PoS)
• 1-port OC-12/STM-4 PoS
• 2- and 4 -port Channelized T3
• 4-port serial (12-in-1)

Customers include BT, who is going to use it as part of their 21st Century network and also NTT who use it as part of their IPTV network roll-out.