Migration from Cisco ISR 1900/2900/3900 to Cisco 4000 ISR routers
Today I am going to talk about the migration of the hardware from Cisco 1900, 2900 and 3900 series ISR router to Cisco ISR 4000 series routers. Cisco announced or going to announced the end of all these routers in this year and hence enterprise networks needs to be refreshed on Cisco 4000 series routers by this year.
What are the various benefits to migrate the devices from Cisco 1900 (which includes 1921,1941) ; Cisco 2900 ( Cisco 2901, Cisco 2921, Cisco 2951) and Cisco 3900 ( Cisco 3925 and Cisco 3945) to Cisco ISR 4000 ?
Well there are so many benefits to migrate from Cisco 1900/2900/3900 to Cisco ISR 4000 series routers and these benefits are :
4 to 10 times performance increase for the same price as the ISR G2. You can get up to 2 Gbps of maximum throughput on Cisco 4k Series router while in earlier case with Cisco 1900/2900/3900, the maximum throughput can be up to 350 Mbps.
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| Fig 1.1- Cisco ISR 1900, 2900 and 3900 to Cisco ISR 4000 router |
As you know the industries moving towards the virtualization where the strategy is the SDN deployments. The earlier models cant support the SDN environment while with the help of Cisco 4k series ISR routers you can have the SDN deployments like be the part of the Cisco DNA network.
Cisco DNA is the major architecture which Cisco wants enterprises to go on as they build all the next generation hardware and architecture on Cisco DNA infrastructure. You can have the separate control and data-plane with the service plane with the help of Cisco 4k Series routers as well while it is not supported in the earlier models.
With the help of Cisco ISR 4k series router you can have the service containers within your router which means that no need for additional branch appliances and spin up services using pluggable virtual machines.
All the earlier Cisco routers which includes Cisco 1900, Cisco 2900 and Cisco 3900 are IOS based devices and no deployments and innovations are going on to the Cisco IOS models while in Cisco ISR 4k series routers the IOS is IOS-XE which has excellent road-map as well in near future to come up with many integration solutions.
What are the various service container applications in Cisco ISR 4k Series routers ?
Well there are many service container applications that can be supported by Cisco ISR 4k Series routers and these service container applications are IPS, WAAS Akamai, PfRv3, AVC, Analytics, WAN optimization, Cisco EnergyWise, Backup, File server and security appliances.
Cisco also investing and working on the SD-WAN solution where they will surely want to integrate the services on to the Cisco 4k Series routers.
Apart from it, Full applications can run inside the router, inside virtual machines (VMs) with no impact to router performance. Apps can be provided by Cisco, partner, or customer. They come as .ova files ready to be installed on the router.
Cisco also working on the branch office solutions for the enterprises called as Enterprise NFV ( Network Function virtualization) where various network functions can be virtualized on Cisco ISR 4k Series router.
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| Fig 1.2- Features and Capabilities |
What are the various models and the capacity in Cisco ISR 4k Series routers ?
Well below are the models available in Cisco ISR 4k Series router with the bandwidth capacity as :
- Cisco 4221 : Bandwidth support from 35 Mbps to 75 Mbps
- Cisco 4321: Bandwidth support from 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps
- Cisco 4331: Bandwidth support from 100 Mbps to 300 Mbps
- Cisco 4351: Bandwidth support from 200 Mbps to 400 Mbps
- Cisco 4431: Bandwidth support from 500 Mbps to 1 Gbps
- Cisco 4451-X: Bandwidth support from 1 Gbps to 2 Gbps
