Product Bulletin - No. 864

Flash Disk for Cisco 7200 Series Routers

Provides Greater Storage than Existing Linear Flash Card

With the rapid growth of networking and the Internet, service provider and enterprise WAN networks are undergoing significant change. New service offerings, increasing volumes of data traffic, and the integration of data, voice, and video, require networks to scale to new levels in order to meet customer requirements. As the global leader in networking, Cisco continually brings new capabilities to service provider and enterprise customers to support these new requirements and enable networks to grow with the demands of network applications.

The high-performance Cisco 7200 series enable customers to meet today’s networking requirements due to the breadth of advanced support for LAN/WAN services, reliability, and performance. The introduction of Flash Disk provides increased Flash-based memory space (40 to 110 MB) for storage in 7200 routers. Flash Disk delivers a less expensive and simpler Flash product while maintaining compatibility with existing linear Flash memory.

Product Overview

Flash Disks, an alternative to linear Flash memory, are Flash memory-based devices that can be used as file storage media in the PC card slots of Cisco 7200 routers and in the route switch module (RSM) used in the Catalyst^® 5000 family systems.

Flash Disk is more flexible than linear Flash memory because Flash Disk has controller circuitry that allows it to emulate a hard disk, automatically map out bad blocks, and perform automatic block erasure. Further, Flash Disk provides the capability to allocate noncontiguous sectors, which eliminates the need for the “squeeze” command (currently required with linear Flash memory cards).

Flash Disk is supported as the primary boot media for NPE-300-based systems. In all other systems, Flash Disk should be used to augment linear Flash memory.

Features and Benefits

Applications

The large capacity of Flash Disk has several applications where significant amounts of storage are required including:

• Multiple Cisco IOS images
  
  
• Large configurations
  
  
• Statistics and accounting
  
  
• Network management data
  
  

All devices will recognize improved manageability of Flash memory without impact on performance or device operation.

Software Requirements

Flash Disk is only supported on systems with the Cisco IOS filesystem feature. In general, Flash Disk functionality requires Cisco IOS release 12.0(2) or a later release of 12.0.

Platform Support

Flash Disk can be used as a file storage media in the PC card slots of the following Cisco products:

• Input/Output (I/O) controller—used in the Cisco 7200 series systems (Cisco 7202, Cisco 7204, Cisco 7206, Cisco 7204VXR, and Cisco 7206VXR), and Cisco uBR7246 universal broadband router
  
  
• RSM—used in the Catalyst 5000 series systems
  
  

Flash Disk Compatibility Requirements

Flash Disk is supported as the primary boot media for NPE-300 based system only. In all other systems, you should use the Flash Disk side-by-side with linear Flash memory. Although it is possible to boot from a Flash Disk, a bootable image must be maintained on a linear Flash memory card to ensure the router is bootable if the bootflash software image becomes unusable.

Ordering Information

Flash Disk is orderable beginning January 18, 1999 with shipments beginning February 1, 1999.