Well, I thought it might be nice to take a moment to look at what Cisco offers
from
a hardware perspective.
And again, their modern platform is the catalyst 8000 series of be careful, not
routers, but
edge platforms.
This is what they call them.
You can see it right here, the 8200 series edge platforms.
Yeah, you and I would call them a router.
Cisco doesn't want to call them a router.
Now be very careful because Cisco also recently released what they call Cisco
8000 routers.
Notice the terminology.
They're not calling it catalyst and they're not calling it edge platforms.
They're calling it routers.
Those do not work with SD when they run iOS X are instead of iOS X E, which is
a service
provider operating system.
And that's exactly what those are designed for.
Why they shows 8000 for both numbers, I could never tell you.
I'm sure somebody smarter than I in the marketing department figured out how
that would somehow
work to their benefit.
Either way, there are three primary series of router routers.
I'm going to call them routers, but edge platforms that will take a look at the
first is the
8200.
So we have 8200, 8300 and 8500.
And as we might imagine, the lower the number, the lower end of the device, the
8200 comes
in a couple of different flavors.
And what we find when we look at these routers is that we've got ethernet ports
, but routers
unlike switches can support other medium types.
So for example, we can install these PIMS and NIMS.
So there would be two different types of interface modules, including the
network interface
module here, the NIM that supports different port types.
So I could deploy, for example, a T1 or a T3 or E1 or E3 type of card.
I could also deploy a 5G card.
And so we can take a look at what some of those modules look like later on.
But when we scroll down here in the data sheet, we see a lot more information
about the 8200.
Specifically, we do have to be careful when we're looking at 8200 versus 8200 L
's.
So the L, which typically stands for lightweight or light, is going to be a
little less performance
driven.
So the idea here is very small sites could use an 8200 L.
It's going to be a lot cheaper to deploy and still be able to participate in SD
-WAN.
All of these catalysts 8200 or 8,000 can support SD-WAN.
So or for more medium sites, we could use this 8200.
So we're looking at these numbers, the part numbers, there's always meaning in
there.
The one N is saying that there's one NIM.
The 4T means that there's actually four T's.
Cisco uses that to represent Ethernet ports, for example.
And so we can see that there's four built in Ethernet WAN ports here, meaning
that before
using an Ethernet rather based wide area network, we can connect to it.
Otherwise, we can use the NIMs.
And we'll take a look at those again here coming up.
So again, we can compare the models here.
But let's go and look at the 8300s.
No, thanks.
Let's not chat.
On the 8300s, you see we've got a lot of different models in here.
And the ability to potentially even deploy, look at how many Ethernet ports we
can deploy.
Yeah, that's a module.
You can see that it actually gets added into this router.
And so we've got a lot of different options that the 8300s provide that are
intended more
for medium to large sites.
Now Cisco would argue that these are not going to be powerful enough for your
headquarters
and aggregation sites, but depending on the size of your organization, they
might well
be.
So when we scroll down, we can again take a look in a lot more detail for each
one of
these models.
And so we see that we've got all kinds of different capabilities and slots,
including
SMs, service modules.
The difference is the network interface modules, the NIMs, the smaller ones
usually give us
those serial type of connections or possibly 5G connections, something that's
not Ethernet
driven.
Service modules are intended to deliver a little bit more functionality to a
remote site.
For example, like we saw with the switch module, I could actually turn this
into a switch and
deliver switched connectivity to my site, because maybe my site is small enough
.
I don't need a whole infrastructure.
If I can deploy an all in one type of box, which is what the 8300s are intended
to be,
well, then why not?
Why wouldn't I turn it into a switch or a server or all kinds of other sets of
functionalities?
And so the different modules are the different models, rather as we scroll down
, we see that
they're equipped with different amounts of NIMs, different amounts of SMs, two
rack units,
one rack unit, different port levels, whether it's one gig or 10 gig, 8300s are
going to
be a lot of what we see in our SD-WAN environments that aren't really small
sites.
Really small sites should get 8200s.
Lastly, the 8500s, again, no things, no need to chat.
These are very, very high performance intended, primarily for our data centers
and aggregation
types of sites.
And we will notice right away that there are no interface modules.
So these are not intended to turn into switches and servers.
We're not trying to deploy these to such small sites that we need them to do
more services
than just being a router.
Instead, this is all about high speed aggregation.
We see we've got 40 gig ports, 100 gig ports in here, and it's all ethernet.
We're not trying to tie into T1s and T3s and E1s and E3s and 5G, rather, and
all of these
different types of services.
So the purpose and the functionality of the 8500s is pretty well established
just by the
physical configuration.
Now lastly, we can also take a look at the interfaces and modules the Cisco
makes for
our Edge platform.
So for example, we can see this is the 8200 specific list of interfaces and
modules.
The ones that are compatible, so they're giving us the software versions
required for 8200s.
But we can click on any of these and see these are the different network
interface modules
that provide ethernet switching.
Ethernet routed ports, these would be layer three ports.
Things start to get a little more interesting when we look at wireless WAN.
I mentioned 5G.
You can also support 3G and 4G.
The ability to deploy T1s and E1s.
Voice interface cards, that's very important for allowing a router to serve the
phone system.
If the WAN goes down, that's a very common service that's required.
The ability, again, these are more ports for our voice world.
And then we even see some broadband serial interfaces and the like.
So lots and lots of options and Cisco continues to sort of be the Swiss Army
knife of Edge
routers because they can support so many different connectivity options.
So regardless of what we need at a site, Cisco's going to have a router that
supports it.
And again, it all fits into the catalyst 8000 line.
Now one thing to keep in mind is from a legacy perspective.
Cisco used to have ISRs and ASR 1Ks, for example.
And what we find is that Cisco just kind of collapsed the ISR and that ASR 1K
line together
into the 8000.
So the 8200s, for example, and those are really lower end devices.
All the 8300s are more like the ISR 4Ks, the 8500s are more like the ASR 1Ks.
And so rather than have, again, ISR and ASR and 1Ks and 9Ks and all kinds of 4K
s and all
kinds of things like that, instead Cisco's put it all into the catalyst 8000
line.
So regardless of our needs, we can procure one of these 8000s and deploy them
to our sites.