loopback0 – Douglas Gourlay's Blog Data Centers, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing

ISR G2 – what I wish it was…

Cisco ISR G2 - the best a branch can get?

Cisco announced the new ISR line recently, a 3x performance improvement for the high-end moving up to ~150Mbps.  But the question I have that has been lingering with me for a while is, "Why not use an x86 processor and a decent hypervisor with that?"

Crazy, I know, right?  But with the current set of Intel Nehalem cores I can get several Gb/s of sustained throughput at varying packet sizes.  So it's not like I have a data plane performance issue.  You can even schedule the cores to provide additional protection for mission-critical control plane processes.

Regrettably, to me, this was not the direction taken with this line.  Why do I think it would be cool?  For several main reasons:

One thing you could do is run several VMs for integrating neat things like Call Managers and Network Analysis.  Who needs a separate co-processor when you can cost-effectively get a CPU with more than enough horsepower and DRAM to run a variety of concurrent branch office workloads.

Control Plane Performance would be through the roof - so you can actually support the market that fiber to the home is creating for Gigabit Ethernet handoffs to the home and business.  This is rapidly expanding and becoming a more and more popular handoff in dense urban environments.

Killer integration - run branch office apps, rin your own apps, run the routing protocol stacks, and have enough process and VM separation to guarantee performance and stability.  But also you wouldn't have to do special versions of IP-PBX call management for the router- you could run the full-blown image right on it.  Want WAN Optimization, load a VM.  Same with Network Analysis, etc.  At some point performance will peter out, but not too soon.

Sadly for me, this feels like an opportunity lost.  But who knows - maybe they will pull a rabbit out of the hat with something like this someday.

dg