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Cisco Boosts Network Programmability
Cisco Systems Inc. this week enhanced its portfolio of services provider solutions with increased programmability and virtualization features, furthering its application-centric vision of new-age networking highlighted by new technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN).
Cisco Application Engineered Routing is one of three improvements to its Evolved Programmable Network (EPN) products, described as "an open, elastic, and application-centric network infrastructure framework that enables services providers to accelerate time to revenue while reducing the costs of deploying new services."
"What, exactly, is Application Engineered Routing?" asked Cisco exec Frederic Trate in a
blog post. "This is a new solution that is not only enhancing our customer's network infrastructure, but also leverages SDN programmability to give further control on how the network infrastructure is delivering applications."
In a press release, the company went into more detail. "With the introduction of Cisco Application Engineered Routing, Cisco is the first in the industry to build an agile service-creation environment, combining the capabilities of open, standards-based Segment Routing with SDN," the company said. "This end-to-end solution drives new levels of programmability, allowing services providers to reduce operational costs and drive incremental revenue with on-demand latency, bandwidth and availability capabilities."
Trate said the technology addressed use cases such as increasing requests on the part of customers to have their services providers route traffic to specifically avoid countries that have known privacy or security concerns. While a seemingly simple request, he said, this presents problems when implementing at scale.
Application Engineered Routing also serves certain vertical industry requirements, Trate said, specifically mentioning the financial industry, which often requires strict latency requirements for moving critical data.
Other new technologies added to the EPN include the IOS XRv 9000 Virtual Router and high-density 100GE line cards for the Cisco ASR 9000 Series of aggregation services routers.
Trate said the new solutions are designed to meet the incredible networking needs in an era of the Internet of Everything (IoE), dense video, the exploding use of mobile devices and the move to cloud services. The company noted that the IoE alone presents a $1.7 trillion market opportunity for services providers in the next 10 years.
Cisco said global IP traffic is expected to see a threefold increase from 2013 to 2018, which means a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent, caused by more Internet users and devices, faster broadband service and more demand for viewing videos.
"Comcast's Converged Network is the strategic platform for delivering our Internet, video, voice and business products," the company quoted exec John Leddy as saying in a customer testimonial. "As new advanced services are developed leveraging technologies like cloud and [network functions virtualization], our network needs to simplify, scale and become extensible. We see IPv6 and Segment Routing as major elements in the evolution of the network. The ability of the network to support, not impede, the innovation occurring in software and services will be a major step forward."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.