Cisco has introduced the Cisco Network Convergence System (NCS), a network fabric family designed to serve as the foundation of a scalable, smarter and more adaptable Internet. Several leading global service providers – including BSkyB (Sky), KDDI and Telstra – are deploying the Cisco NCS to create new revenue streams, simplify operations and deliver exciting personalized experiences to their customers. The system’s programmability and virtualization capabilities enable service providers to accelerate the transition to software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV).
As per the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast (2012-2017), there will be 2 billion networked devices in India by 2017, up from 1 billion in 2012. VNI also projects India’s IP traffic to grow 6 fold from 2012- 2017 with a 44% CAGR, which is the highest growth rate across the globe. This unprecedented data and devices growth offers monetization opportunities for Service Providers but at the same time puts immense pressure on their networks.
The NCS’s industry-leading capabilities enable service providers to not only accommodate growing network traffic but also seize the opportunity created by trillions of programmable device-driven events generated by the Internet of Everything (IoE), the networked connection of people, data, processes and things. The IoE requires networks to scale not only bandwidth, but also compute and control functions to manage policies and to program responses with precise results in the expected timeframe. The NCS is designed to facilitate such IoE events, which can be ongoing “conversations” creating strings of interactivity between people, applications and devices, such as wearable health monitors linking with personal information and cloud-based health portals or 4G LTE-connected automobiles signaling that a driver is almost home, prompting the home network to adjust home temperature and lighting.
With trillions of new “connected events” predicted to occur over Internet networks in the next decade, service providers have significant monetization opportunities during this timeframe, particularly in certain vertical markets, such as healthcare ($174 billion), manufacturing ($284 billion), and smart homes ($850 billion) (source: Machina Research).
The NCS family, with more than 100 patents, joins the Cisco Carrier Routing System (CRS) and Aggregation Services Router (ASR) families and acts as a foundational network fabric to interconnect the architecture.Industry’s only system built for petabit scale, capable of supporting trillions of events across a connected fabric, the NCS is capable of transporting the entire Netflix library in less than one second. The NCS extends, connects, controls and responds to applications, networks and data centers by managing and moving network and compute resources wherever and whenever they are needed across the architecture, in real time.
The Cisco NCS family consists of three key components- NCS 6000, NCS 4000 and NCS 2000 that can be managed as a single integrated system for business agility and simplified operations.”NCS is a powerful solution for service providers who are looking to create robust networks, data centers and applications that have advanced capabilities in areas such as programmability, performance, resiliency and scale in order to drive business growth. This will provide a competitive edge to service providers in India who are currently grappling with multiple challenges, and will help prepare their infrastructure to create differentiated consumer experiences in order to capitalize on market opportunities offered by the data/ video growth and device proliferation. We are bullish about the adoption and success of NCS by Service Providers in India,” said Sanjay Rohatgi, Managing Director, Service Provider Sales, Cisco India and SAARC.