Cisco unveiled today a new high-capacity edge router that it hopes will allow the vendor to take the lead against key rivals Juniper Networks and Alcatel-Lucent.

The new ASR 9000 aggregation services router was built using the same family of in-house processors that drive Cisco’s previously introduced edge router, the ASR 1000. But because it was designed to sit upstream of -- and aggregate traffic from -- the compact 1000s, the 9000 comes with a lot more capacity: 6.4 terabits per second in a half-rack chassis (that’s based on adding incoming and outgoing traffic together). With 6- and 10-slot versions, each slot can carry up to 400 gigabits per second.

One of the key features of the 9000 – available in next year’s first quarter starting at $80,000 -- is its distributed control plane architecture. With control plane resources pushed from the core to 9000s at the edge, services and applications can in essence be protected from one another in a multiservice environment. It will allow carriers to, for example, trial new residential services using the same box that already delivers a different set of services to business customers.

“You don’t have to worry about if this particular service is compromised, you’re not compromising the entire control plane,” said Ray Mota, chief strategy officer at Synergy Research Group. “You’re just compromising that particular BGP service or app being deployed.”

That architectural move echoes one made by Cisco’s rival, Juniper Networks, earlier this year, when it unveiled a discrete, external control plane, the JCS 1200, for its routers.

Notably, the 9000 is managed not by IOS-XE operating system that manages the ASR 1000 but by the IOS-XR operating system that manages Cisco’s CRS-1 core router. Cisco is touting the XR’s high availability aspects and its proven track record, having been deployed in hundreds of carrier networks.