Cisco 12000 Series SPA Interface Processor-400

The Cisco® I-Flex design combines shared port adapters (SPAs) and SPA interface processors (SIPs), leveraging an extensible design that enables service prioritization for voice, video and data services. Enterprise and service provider customers can take advantage of improved slot economics resulting from modular port adapters that are interchangeable across Cisco routing platforms. The I-Flex design maximizes connectivity options and offers superior service intelligence through programmable interface processors that deliver line-rate performance. I-Flex enhances speed-to-service revenue and provides a rich set of QoS features for premium service delivery while effectively reducing the overall cost of ownership. This data sheet contains the specifications for the Cisco 12000 Series SPA Interface Processor-400 (Cisco 12000 SIP-400; refer to Figure 1).

Figure 1. Cisco 12000 SIP-400 with SPAs

PRODUCT OVERVIEW

• A common 2.5-Gpbs forwarding and queuing engine responsible for packet classification, forwarding, queuing, and accounting without compromising the performance. The forwarding engine, based on the Cisco 12000 Series ISE technology, features a unique, edge-optimized, programmable adaptive network processor that combines the hardware performance of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) with the flexibility of software.

• A modular physical layer interface module (PLIM) front end that hosts up to 4 SPAs. Each SPA has a dedicated 2.5-Gbps interface to the SPA controller. The Cisco 12000 SIP-400 supports any combination of the following pluggable SPAs and Layer 2 encapsulations: T3; E3; CT3; Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC), and Frame Relay; Multilink PPP (MLPPP); and Multilink Frame Relay (MLFR).

• A SPA controller that is responsible for adapting the user traffic flowing between the SPA interfaces and the Layer 3 forwarding engine. The SPA controller has two levels of priority queuing with Deficit Round Robin (DRR) and strict priority servicing. The strict priority is designed to protect higher-priority traffic.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS

• QoS

– Traffic shaping offers additional value to service providers that want to build tiered service models. With traffic shaping, the Cisco 12000 SIP-400 can absorb bursty traffic in both the ingress and egress directions. This allows service providers to present smooth flows to both internal network resources and customer networks. The Cisco 12000 SIP-400 supports up to 2048 input-shaped queues and up to 1024 output-shaped queues dynamically allocated to any interface (or subinterface). Traffic can be shaped down to 64 kbps.

– Traffic rate-limiting and marking using committed access rate (CAR) or Modular QoS CLI (MQC) allows service providers to control access to internal network resources. This can be used to protect against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, or as a mechanism to deliver tiered services, offering customers a "pay-as-you-grow" model.

– Traffic prioritization through Modified DRR (MDRR) with low-latency queuing (LLQ) offers class-based packet queuing that controls the packet dequeuing process to assure transit latency for differentiated flows. The Cisco 12000 SIP-400 supports 2048 unicast MDRR queues, 16 high-priority queues, and 1 multicast queue in the ingress direction; and up to 4096 MDRR queues dynamically shared across 1024 interfaces in the egress direction.

– Congestion control through Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED) and query management allows selective discard of low-priority flows before dropping packets from higher-priority flows.

• Provider edge

– Comprehensive MPLS capabilities support the development of service-optimized networks and can accelerate migration from circuit-based networks to packet-based networks, creating new market opportunities for service providers. These include Layer 2 VPNs over MPLS (Any Transport over MPLS [AToM]) and over IP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol Version 3 [L2TPv3]); Layer 3 VPNS over MPLS and over IP Multicast VPNs; MLPPP, MLFR, link fragmentation and interleaving (LFI) over Frame Relay; IPv6 Unicast and Multicast; and 6PE.

• Security

– Access control lists (ACLs) and Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (URPF) provide security and access control by checking or filtering unwanted packets on specific interfaces. With ACLs, filtering can be done on source or destination IP addresses, on transport protocols, or at input or output interfaces.

• Accounting

– Service providers can take advantage of the ISE accounting tools to provide data for end-customer billing, or to monitor network usage. The accounting tools available on the Cisco 12000 SIP-400 include input and output full NetFlow v8 in hardware; input and output sampled NetFlow v5, v8, and v9 in hardware; Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) policy accounting; and per-interface, -protocol, or -class-of-service accounting.

• High availability

– Online insertion and removal (OIR) of one SPA does not affect the traffic on other SPA interfaces. The Cisco 12000 SIP-400 also supports Layer 3 nonstop forwarding (NSF) and stateful switchover (SSO).

PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS

Table 1. Product Specifications

ORDERING INFORMATION

Table 2. Ordering Information

SERVICE AND SUPPORT

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