The rapid expansion of the Internet has fundamentally changed the way organizations conduct business. With this growth, enterprise customers are seeking higher bandwidth aggregation of WAN links to the Internet. Likewise the service provider community is faced with meeting the continued demand from consumers for Internet access. These factors are driving service provider and enterprise customers to solutions that optimize network density, bandwidth aggregation, availability, serviceability, and operational costs.The high-performance Cisco 7500 Series Routers remain the market leader due to its breadth of advanced support for LAN/WAN services, redundancy, reliability, and performance. A distributed architecture using Versatile Interface Processors (VIPs) is the key to the Cisco 7500's scalability. Each VIP has its own processor, which is capable of switching IP data packets and providing network services. This scenario allows the overall system performance of Cisco 7500 routers to scale up when they need to handle more high-speed network connections and more data packets. The RSP is still the master of the system. It runs routing protocols with other routers in the network to gather switching intelligence, which is then downloaded to the VIPs so that each can switch IP packets on its own.