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Does Cisco's Switch To Linux Make IOS More Open?: Page 2 of 2

Cisco isn't going that far yet. Riverbed's accelerators are aimed
at small offices (where they compete with Cisco's WAAS, the box that
will run Windows), whereas the ASR is intended for much bigger
corporate or carrier data centers. Right now, its virtualization just
means multiple instances or versions of IOS XE. But with many of the
networking startups that Cisco buys selling Linux-based appliances,
KVM could make their technology much easier to assimilate.

Much of the value in high-end switches and routers comes from
their custom hardware, which in the ASR's case means the QuantumFlow
network processor – a new 40-core chip designed to handle 160
simultaneous threads.  Cisco doesn't usually bother to list chips' names or tout their features separately from the products they go in, so it's clearly impressed with the QuantumFlow.

The QuantumFlow itself doesn't run Linux or IOS – they're
in the control plane, it's in the data plane – but it, too, is
more open than the ASICs that Cisco has traditionally used in its
switches and routers. It can be programmed in standard C, and it's
designed to be upgradeable to support new services. But as with IOS, all that programming will be done by Cisco, not by users.