Cisco recently announced a new core router with 10 times the capacity of the original equipment in the series, aiming to support the traffic demands that operators are facing.
The Carrier Routing System-X (CRS-X) is a 400 Gbps per slot system that can be expanded to handle almost one Petabit (10^15 bits) per second in a multi-chassis deployment.
Cisco expects that two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2017, reflecting a 16-fold increase from 2012; and that global IP traffic will reach an annual run rate of 1.4 zettabytes (10^21 bytes) in the same period.
By 2017, the company says more than 19 billion devices will be on the network and more than 62% of workloads will be in the cloud, with multi-access that includes broadband, Wi-Fi and the RAN.
Sri Hosakote, VP and general manager of Cisco’s high end routing and optical group, said that growth is not the only issue — there are also differences in network traffic patterns, with the emergence of local data centers; and the type of traffic as well, with more video content that is not originating with service providers.
He said that among the broad trends is the fact that service providers “have all got 10 [gigabit] networks tapped out, and are migrating to 100 gig — they basically have to do that to keep pace with some of the dynamics.”
Hosakote also said that some service providers have maintained separate networks for residential services and wholesale, or enterprise customers, and that those networks are converging, which Cisco aims to support.
Meanwhile, F5 launched a new firewall to support security in 3G and 4G mobile networks. The Big-IP Advanced Firewall Manager can be deployed as either a hardware or software solution, and the company also offers its Big-IQ Security product for firewall policy management in enterprise and service provider environments.
The firewall protects the Gi interface in 3G networks and SGi interface in 4G networks, on the perimeter between a provider’s mobile network and the Internet.
“It fundamentally protects the radio network from the Internet,” said Brian Lazear, senior director of product management at F5. He added that having as little latency as possible in security is important for mobile providers, as well as an ability to scale. According to F5, the S/Gi firewall has throughput of 640 Gbps and can handle up to 8 million connections per second and up to 576 million concurrent connections.
Andrew Hendry, solution marketing manager at F5, said that the security solutions are designed to fit into its other products such as Big-IP and its Big-IQ Cloud platform, seamlessly and maximize the number of solutions and intelligence that service providers can get from a single platform.
“We’ve had a lot of interest with Tier 1 carriers looking for these kind of platforms to provide the scale and performance they need … that’s going to simplify their network operations architecture,” he said.
