Cisco Tuesday announced the introduction of a new series of routers, the XR 12000, geared towards helping service providers deliver more secure, reliable and faster services to their customers.

The monster routers run Cisco IOS XR, a specialised flavour of Cisco's core internetworking operating system, which brings virtualisation features to high-end networking kit. The technology allows telcos to configure a single XR 12000 router into separate physical and logical routing domains.

The XR 12000 is designed to scale from 2.5Gbps to 10Gbps per slot. Service providers and research network users such as BellSouth Corporation, DFN (Germany's national research and education network) and China's Education and Research Network (CERNET) are evaluating the product.

Cisco is pitching the kit to next step up for the 25,000 users of its 12000 router. The Cisco XR 12000 Series is expected to be available in June 2005, with basic configurations starting at $45,500. Upgrades from Cisco 12000 routers start at $12,500. ®

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