Cisco 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 1000) vs Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000)

• In most cases, the larger ASR routers such as the 1006 and 1009s have sufficient capabilities to be used as a Core network router.
• The smaller ASRs such as the 1002 devices are best suited on the edge, capable of handling a limited number of connections due to the fixed chassis.

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• Easy to use, simple to operate, highly predictable. IOS/IOS-XE is well known and there is a virtually limitless pool of engineers who know this platform and if not having direct experience, can apply knowledge from other IOS/IOS-XE with very little adjustment.
• Extremely flexible due to wide variety of interfaces. NIM and SM-X provide a great deal options: TDM, E&M, FXO, FXS, switches and servers are all options.
• Robust IP feature set: Routing protocols, NBAR, Netflow, QoS, DMVPN. This large IP feature set gives us the ISR makes it a highly re-usable router, capable in many different use cases.

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• Licensing on the routers is more complicated than it needs to be. We have the ASR routers along with ISR routers both have the license of the advanced service, however, on the ISR routers that license did not include the app-X feature needed to send the application specific net-flow data we wanted. It would be better if Cisco was consistence with the features included with licenses.
• Some software patches are quite involved as there is a boot loaded and IOS that must be upgraded.

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• The UCS-E blades that you can insert into the routers only get refreshed every 4-5 years. So the cpu/memory/HDD options are limited and quite dated
• Some LTE connectivity options for some countries are lacking or LTE NIM cards for some countries are not supported
• Does not support dual power supply options for maintaining uptime from power events

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• Positive of ASR 1000 is its cost effectiveness as a WAN aggregation router providing 10G-100G interface limited by 200G performance.
• As such there is no negative side, but if you need more then 200 Gbps performance then you need to change the Router, that's the only option.

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• deployment in different branches were quick and easy to be done
• Same config push on all routers helped to get the setup done in few hours.
• expansion is very easy with NIM available for different purpose whether it be WAN port or PRI or FXS port.
• Cube license helps to increase the SIP channel as and when required as no hardware change is required which is very helpful.

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