Cisco’s all the other routers runs on IOS operating system but this kind of IOS operating system is not affordable for small organizations and low-cost business people. Hence to avoid this gap between those people and Cisco’s routers they have come up with a new router which could run on Linux system.

This new router from Cisco is designed in a different manner to satisfy the needs of small business enterprises and completely different from Cisco’s complex routers. The setup is also easier when compared to IOS-powered routers.

Other than this Cisco also announced the new SA-500 series security appliance for small business users which provides them Unified Threat Management (UTM). These UTM along with SA-500 series routers provides has many features such as firewall, VPN, antisapm, URL filtering and antivirus. These routers are designed to capture small and midsized business organizations as the business activities of bigger organizations slowed down a lot due to this recession.

This new release based on Linux OS is not new as they have already released one Linux based server card called the AXP (Application eXtension Platform). This AXP from Cisco helps in developing and integrating applications in an open environment. This card just enters into the router and runs on its own memory, flash drive or hard drive, Ethernet connection which is in gigabit. Finally it uses a Linux server to control all the functions which is designed by Cisco. Because of the use of Linux powered server now you could run MRTG, Cacti, SNORT, Nagios, SawMill, phpIP and any other open source application which runs using PERL, Python, PHP, JAVA and etc.

This AXP has many features, in that Cisco 1841, 2800 series and 3800 series integrated server routers are supported by this AXP and it also contains certified libraries for C, Python, Perl and Java applications.