Cisco Grows Its Cloud and Adds Elastic Core for Carriers

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The Cisco Carrier Routing System, also known as CRS-3 (Image: Cisco Systems)

Cisco (CSCO) has made several recent announcements about its cloud strategy, a full solution portfolio for SAP HANA and a new CRS elastic core solution.

Cisco announced new elastic core networking capabilities that enable service providers to scale revenue-generating services within minutes instead of months. The new solution includes an integrated 100 Gbps Internet Protocol over dense wave division multiplexing (IPoDWDM) and Cisco's new nLight technology for the Cisco Carrier Routing System (CRS) converges IP and optical transport networks.

The “Elastic Core” brings the IP, transit and transport capabilities together in a unified solution, allowing IP and optical network layers to work together at speeds of 100Gbps and beyond. Cisco's nLight technology enables 100 Gbps transport services without the need for costly signal regeneration.  Cisco CRS platform is a 400 Gbps per-slot ready solution with a multi-chassis architecture, and can converge IP and optical layers at 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps, and now coherent 100 Gbps speeds. The “Elastic Core” adds new, advanced anti-Distributed Denial of Service or anti-DDoS capability to the carrier-grade service options already available on CRS.

"CESNET is very happy to be the first customer to deploy Cisco’s nLight silicon, enabling 100 Gbps IPoDWDM in a production network," said Jan Gruntorád, managing director and member of the board of directors, CESNET, a national research and education network in the Czech Republic. "IPoDWDM is a very innovative technology that will serve as the foundation for our high-speed data services, while helping us reduce network costs and improve network operations. The Cisco CRS provides an intelligent core solution with the ability to scale up to 400 Gbps per slot, which will meet our service demands well into the future. The CRS enables reliable and continuous operation, as well as a very smooth migration path from the CRS-1 to the CRS-3 platform."

vCider Acquisition

Last week Cisco announced that it had acquired privately-held vCider, a company that has expertise in the development of virtual network overlay technology for secure data center infrastructure. As a part of Cisco's Cloud Computing organization under CTO Lew Tucker, vCider will play an important role in the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy, particularly in support of OpenStack. The vCider team has created a multi-tenant distributed virtual network controller. vCider’s code and technology will be integrated into current development efforts of the OpenStack Quantum network service.

Full Solution Portfolio for SAP HANA

Cisco introduced a full suite of solutions for the SAP HANA platform built on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). The Cisco UCS portfolio for SAP HANA includes extra-small, small and medium-sized rack-mount solutions that support up to one-half terabyte (TB) of compressed user data. The portfolio allows for scale-out blade server solutions with 8 terabytes of memory, and storage from either EMC or NetApp. SAP IT Process Automation by Cisco provides a special feature set for SAP HANA.

"As data continues to grow exponentially, the ability to deliver real-time business intelligence is helping customers move more quickly to address issues and capture opportunities," said Satinder Sethi, Vice President, Cisco. "Together SAP HANA and Cisco UCS are delivering a winning combination of innovative technologies to reduce operational costs and enhance application performance."

Cisco Success Stories

Cisco also has a few success story videos recently about redundant Cisco Nexus cores, and amazing infrastructure build-outs for the Major League Baseball fan experience, and both Republican and Democrat conventions.