Cisco ISR4431-V/K9 Router

Cisco ISR4431-V/K9 Router is an enterprise Cisco router, from the ISR 4000 family: 500Mbps-1Gbps system throughput, 4 WAN/LAN ports, 4 SFP ports, multi-Core CPU, Dual-power, Security, Voice, WAAS, Intelligrnt WAN, OnePK, AVC, separate control data and services CPUs.

What it presents. 4 SFP cages, 4 WAN ports.

Throughput is quoted as 500 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s, and that range is not a typo. On this generation the hardware ships capped below what the silicon can do and a performance licence lifts the cap. The lower figure is what you get out of the box; the upper is what it will do once licensed. Worth knowing before you benchmark it and conclude something is broken: a router sitting at exactly its lower number is behaving correctly and is simply unlicensed.

What this platform is for. The ISR 4000 is a branch and regional-office router from Cisco’s current Integrated Services line, where throughput is licensed in tiers rather than fixed. Knowing the family’s intended role is usually more useful than the part number when you are working out whether something fits: a chassis built for one job will do another, but rarely well, and the cost of that mismatch tends to show up as throughput or feature limits rather than as an outright failure.

Three questions worth answering before any router purchase, whatever the model. What the throughput requirement actually is with your feature set enabled, rather than the datasheet figure measured without it. Whether the features you need are licensed as well as present, since on most platforms security and performance are separate entitlements. And how many slots or ports you will need in three years, because adding capacity is cheap and replacing a chassis is not.

A point about end-of-life notices on a platform like this, because it causes real confusion. Cisco publishes these per part number, not per family. The ISR 4000 family is not retired, but individual line cards, route processors and software releases within it have their own notices, and some of them have passed. So “is the platform current?” and “is this specific card still supported?” are two different questions with potentially different answers.

That is why we check the exact part number rather than the family before quoting. Send us the code you are looking at and we will tell you where that specific item stands, not where the platform stands.

Tell us what the router has to do, the circuits it has to terminate, the throughput you are designing to and whether you need the security features licensed. We would rather size it from the requirement than from a part number, because the two commonest mistakes on a router purchase are buying throughput that turns out to need a licence and buying a chassis with no slots left.

Green Code Technologies is a supplier of Cisco, and we supply Huawei and Juniper networking alongside HPE, Dell, Samsung, Netgear, Ubiquiti and Asus. We would rather tell you a part is no longer supported, or that we need to check it, than take an order for something that will not do what you need.