Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Cisco, the Silicon Valley giant that started as a network-focused vendor but had since ballooned into many other markets through an aggressive acquisition strategy, on Tuesday unveiled the next-generation network carrier routing system. The CRS-3 is three times more powerful than its older brother CRS-1, which the company says will remain in production.

Keith Cambron, president and CEO of AT&T; Labs, joined several Cisco executives, including CEO John Chambers, in a Webcast announcement of the new system. The large network operator made CRS-3 part of its trials of 100G Ethernet, which Cambron said concluded successfully.

"We did complete that 100G technology trial," he said. "We did it over a commercial fiber route that we're putting into service. It was a demonstration of that single-carrier 100G technology over a real commercial production route."

The company is putting the route into service at 40G, but "we're confident we can take all (that) learning and all this technology and move it onto the 100G backbone," Cambron said, stopping short of saying when the world could expect to see a 100G AT&T; backbone.

Chambers called CRS-3 nothing less than the "new foundation for the next-generation Internet."

The product fits into Cisco's long-term strategy of betting heavily on collaboration, video, virtualization and cloud and the network as the platform that supports all of the above.

Pankaj Patel, SVP and GM of Cisco's Service Provider Group, said the new system, at 322 Tbps, is CRS-1 times three. According to Cisco, the CRS-3 occupies chassis of the same size as CRS-1 does and requires the same amount of power and cooling.

To enable tight virtualization linkage between CRS-3 and the data center, or the cloud, Cisco unveiled two other innovations in Tuesday.

One is the network positioning system (NPS), which locates available compute and storage resources in a cloud infrastructure of wide geographical scale. The second innovation is a cloud VPN, created automatically when the workload on the infrastructure increases, using resources identified by the NPS.

"This is about how the application ... can really find the content and the resources in the network in the most optimal way," Patel said.