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Chapter 4

Cisco's Diagnostic Commands

Cisco 7000 Series Router Architecture

The Cisco 7000 router is a high-end router, and the 7000 model is the top end of
the series. The key feature of this router is the chassis architecture. The backplane
of this router is designed to accommodate a wide variety of interface processors,
which can be paralleled to a network interface card (NIC). The Cisco 7000
series routers can support the following network technologies/interface
processors:

AIP (ATM Interface Processor)

HIP (HSSI Interface Processor)

EIP (Ethernet Interface Processor)

FSIP (Fast Serial Interface Processor)

FEIP (Fast Ethernet Interface Processor)

FIP (FDDI Interface Processor)

TRIP (Token Ring Interface Processor)

In addition to these network interfaces, the router uses these other processors:

CIP (Channel Interface Processor)

MIP (Multi-channel Interface Processor)

SP (Switch Processor)

SSP (Silicon Switch Processor)

RP (Route Processor)

RSP7000 (Route Switch Processor 7000 series)

Let's talk about the network interface processors first. Each board that is

inserted into the router connects to the CxBus backplane of the router. This
backplane serves as the link between all other boards installed in the router.
Bandwidth capacity for the backplane is 533Mbps.

Interface processors, which interface with the backplane and allow data trans-

fer, exist on each board. It is possible to oversubscribe the backplane. For example,
if you install five Fast Ethernet boards with two interfaces per board, you have a
total of 10 interfaces. The aggregate bandwidth is one Gbps, which is almost dou-
ble what the CxBus can handle.

Interface processors allow network connections, but the RP, RSP7000, SP, and

SSP are the heart of the 7000 series router. Look at Figure 4.3 to see how all of
these processors relate to one another. You can see that the RP sits at the top of the
diagram. The route processor does Layer 3 processing. It maintains the route
table, ARP table, system cache, and memory. It also contains the main system IOS
and configuration.

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