The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Embedded Services Processors (ESPs) are centralized forwarding engines for the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregated Services Routers. These modules provide silicon - and hardware-based assistance to sustain high bandwidth and throughput even with features enabled.
The 10-Gbps ESP (ESP10) supports 10 Gbps of bandwidth, and you can deploy it in customer networks that require 1 + 1 redundancy.
The ESP10 is based on the innovative Cisco QuantumFlow Processor (QFP) for next-generation forwarding and queuing in silicon.
The ESP10 module features hardware-assisted quality of service (QoS), hardware-based encryption, and special jitter - and latency-minimizing multicast packet replication, allowing for the integration of services and the enablement of features that typically would result in performance degradation from manufacturers' advertised throughput maxima.
When used in combination with the Cisco ASR 1006 Router chassis, the ESP10 module can be configured in the router (1 + 1 redundancy) to provide carrier-class high availability.