Shared Port Adapters

I've been working in a new company for the last almost six months, this company is actually a carrier, I have to say that I'm not involved with carrier equipment (yet) but still I'm surrounded of people who is involved and I've learned some new things about.

The last week I saw an email talking about an issue with a SPA card, I have never heard about and SPA card.

So.. What is a SPA?

SPA stands for "SHARED PORT ADAPTER", and is a network card that is inserted in a subslot. It provides connectivity for diferent services and interfaces, such as:

-Circuit Emulation and Channelized ATM
-Interface Processors
-Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)
-Serial/Channelized
-Ethernet
-IP over DWDM
-IPSec VPN Services SPA
-Packet Over SONET (POS)

Next, you can see two images of two cards from the long list of available SPA cards in the market:

Cisco Services SPA Carrier-400 with Two Cisco IPSec VPN SPAs:

Cisco 2-Port Gigabit Ethernet SPA:

SPA INTERFACE PROCESSOR

The SPAs are inserted in SIPs, SIP stands for "SPA INTERFACE PROCESSOR". SIPs are carrier cards that you buy and insert into a router slot, they have the subslots where the SPA's will be placed. Below are some supported platforms: Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches
Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers
Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers
Cisco 7304 Router
Cisco 7600 Series Routers
Cisco 12000 Series Routers
Cisco XR 12000 Series Routers
Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System

The next image is a Cisco CRS-1 SIP-800 surrounded of some SPA's:

You can find more information in Cisco's web site:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/interfaces-modules/shared-port-adapters-spa-interface-processors/index.html