Cisco unveiled the Catalyst routing line today, which is designed to meet the needs of the cloud-first enterprise. The new routers aim to consolidate much of Cisco's Integrated Services Routers (ISR), Aggregation Services Routers, (ASR), and Cloud Services Routers (CSR) under a single product name.

"These are best-in-class platforms designed to meet the business needs for SD-WAN, for [secure access service edge] and with 5G in mind," said Archana Khetan, senior director of product management for Cisco's enterprise routing division, in an interview with SDxCentral.

According to Khetan, the routers address the accelerated adoption of multi-cloud and the increase in traffic from IoT and 5G as well as the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The Catalyst 8300 is designed for use in edge deployments like branch offices. It can be configured as a standard router or as an SD-WAN appliance.

Thanks to the updated multi-core x86 processor, Khetan claims it can deliver a five-fold improvement in IPsec performance and a four-fold improvement in services performance.

The Catalyst 8500, on the other hand, is designed to replace Cisco's ASR 1001 and 1002-HX appliances for use in data centers, colocation facilities, and aggregation sites. The Catalyst 8500 uses Cisco's third-generation Quantum Flow ASIC, which is designed to provide high-performance routing and security functionality.

According to Khetan, the shift to remote work has increased the number of virtual private network tunnels aggregation routers have to terminate. "These platforms have the highest in the industry in terms of tunnel scalability," she said.

This is achieved, in part, thanks to Cisco's custom ASICs, but network interfaces also play a role, explained Khetan. The Catalyst 8500 sports integrated 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces in a single rack-unit chassis.

Finally, Cisco is offering Catalyst as a virtual router, called the 8000V Edge Software, which replaces the CSR. The virtual router can be deployed to the cloud or as a virtual network function on Cisco's 5000 series Enterprise Network Compute System.

All of these platforms will run Cisco's IOS-XE operating system.

Alongside the new routers, Cisco also introduced a new line of wireless WAN appliances called the Catalyst Cellular Gateways. Initially, the gateway will provide connectivity over 4G LTE, up to category-18 speeds. Cisco plans to roll out 5G versions of the gateway later this year.

The full Catalyst hardware line is available today, while Cisco's virtual routing platform will launch in December.