What are some of the key components of the Cisco end-to-end architecture? In this chapter, we will walk you through some of the highlights of our portfolio and discuss how it can help position you to take advantage of today’s opportunities.
Customer Access Point and Access
At the edge of the architecture, customer access points represent the end-users you will serve. The access part of the architecture refers to the access technology used to reach end-users.
Your enterprise users can take advantage of Cisco’s Managed Services offering and SD-WAN solutions with Viptela and/or Meraki, including new 5G Enterprise Services.
If you are providing household consumer services, Cisco solutions enable you to move the physical layer (PHY) circuit out of a device such as a Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS)/Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP), putting the PHY circuit at the edge of a network. This architecture requires a Converged Interconnect Network (CIN) network, utilizing the Cisco WAN offering.
Radio heads support mobility use cases such as Wi-Fi. These components can help you evolve to 5G services, through support for RAN disaggregation (separation of hardware and software) and decomposition (breaking the RAN into separate components). For Virtual RAN (vRAN) or Open RAN (oRAN) deployments, you can flexibly position components such as the Remote Unit (RU), Distributed Unit (DU) and Central Unit (CU) in different locations in the network. Cisco solutions interoperate smoothly with a variety of RAN components, to provide you full flexibility to deploy the solutions that meet your specific requirements, and avoid vendor lock-in.
You can support centralization and virtualization of the DU using a cloud infrastructure platform based on Cisco Virtualized Infrastructure Manager with real-time kernel capabilities and support for a hardware accelerator, such as Intel N3000 field programmable gate array (FPGA).
As we move into the access layer of our end-to-end architecture, segment routing is a key enabler for enterprise services, and a powerful capability to grow revenues. Segment routing at the access layer lets you take advantage of end-to-end automation and control of stricter SLAs that you can monetize more easily. You can provide support for low latency traffic as well as true disjoint path services that are especially valuable for enterprises.
Cisco can help your build a best of both worlds SD-WAN and segment routing service offering, providing your customers the ability to build their own services and tie it to a guaranteed path through your underlying network. This type of use case could be an excellent offering for a public sector customer where individual departments or public service could operate independently on the network. For example, different departments, such as police, healthcare, or city services, could create their own overlay services on top of the underlying network, and apply their own specific SLA and service requirements for their traffic. Service providers could offer this as a self-service product to clients, or as a managed service offering with both designs providing new revenue streams.
Pre-Aggregation
The pre-aggregation section of the end-to-end architecture aggregates access sites. It utilizes routing solutions such as the Cisco NCS family of routers, including the NCS540 and NCS 5500 series.
The Cisco NCS 55A2 Series Router provides IP over Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (IPoDWDM) capability through the Modular Port Adapter (MPA). It collapses network layers by tightly integrating DWDM interfaces with the routing platform. This helps you increase operational efficiency by simplifying management and accelerating service delivery. This IPoDWDM solution not only reduces transport elements, but also supports advanced features to help you dramatically reduce operating expenses and capital cost.
Supporting and simplifying new services with Telco cloud
The Telco cloud is the hardware and software infrastructure supporting flexible and efficient deployment of the applications that service providers use to manage and deliver their services.
This unified operational environment helps you achieve the benefits of the Cisco service provider infrastructure. It enables each new service and application to leverage the platform investment and take advantage of simplified operational processes.
Traditional approaches to software, infrastructure, application management, and cloud operating models have been fragmented and limit your business growth. They create inefficiencies, contribute to operational complexity, and hamper your ability to use technology resources efficiently. This inefficiency limits how well you can innovate, bring services to market quickly and compete effectively.
Telco cloud lets you differentiate your services in terms of service availability and latency, by putting them in closer proximity to the customer. This unified platform also helps you design and deploy new services and features much more rapidly. Telco cloud enables you to create economies of scale with each additional service through a common operational environment and infrastructure.
The Cisco Telco cloud environment supports telco apps related to end user services. It is made up of compute, switching and networking hardware, and a virtualization stack with full orchestration and automation. Cisco Nexus switches support these services, as well as the Remote Leaf (RL) feature that is part of the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) offering.
The RL feature lets you extend the ACI policy model from outside the main data center to remote sites over an IP backbone. It allows service providers to apply the policy controls needed for specific service offerings by extending the ACI fabric to a small data center without investing in a full-blown ACI fabric.
Aggregation
The next area of our end-to-end architecture is Aggregation. Aggregation at Edge or Metro Sites is where many infrastructure services and gateways reside, such as Business Provider Edge (PE), Broadband Network Gateway (BNG), and mobility gateways. Cisco ASR9000 Routers and NCS5500 Series families let you power these components.
Cisco’s Telco cloud has also been optimized for lean, cost-efficient edge distribution to help you reduce costs. In Telco cloud deployments at the Edge Data Center, the scalable Cisco Nexus platforms support 100/400G interfaces. You can take advantage of dynamic interworking between segment routing environments in the WAN and ACI in the data center. This enables seamless, automated mapping of virtual machines (VM) and container traffic to WAN network slices with strong SLAs.
Cisco Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) pods support the more centralized Telco cloud applications. These pods are available in multiple versions at a variety of scales to support locations that require more scale or additional data center services such as storage. For these environments, Cisco offers many flexible options including hyperconverged storage or remote storage.
Core and Peering
The core sites in the architecture generally interconnect to the Edge sites and provide connection to the outside world via peering points. These sites often have high bandwidth and resiliency requirements. Cisco routing and optical products, including high capacity Cisco ASR 9000 Series Routers or the NCS 5500 series, can provide the performance and dependable operation you need in these core or peering site locations.
Cisco Optical platforms, such as the NCS1001, NCS1004, and NCS2000 offer data center interconnect and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) solutions.
At peering points, you can deploy the Cisco 8000 Series Router, the industry’s most scalable 400G-optimized routing system capable of supporting from 10 Tbps up to 260 Tbps. It delivers unprecedented petabit scale, an embedded trust anchor module, and cloud-enhanced software technology. The system comes in both fixed and modular platforms, and is purpose built to be applicable to any network including mobile, cable or wireline. It offers flexible consumption models for port licensing allowing service providers to invest in leading technology without overpaying. The flexible consumption model allows you to pay as you grow, scaling up port capacity to support additional traffic when 5G and other innovations arrive.
For Telco cloud deployments, the infrastructure’s core sites often utilize both regional and central data centers. Cisco scalable Nexus platforms support 100G and 400G interfaces. ACI features such as Multi-Site Orchestration (MSO) are key to enabling automation and policy consistency at scale across multiple sites.
If you require multi-cloud support at core locations, Cisco Cloud ACI lets you extend the ACI fabric into public cloud providers like Amazon, Google or Microsoft. This enables you to offer enterprise Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) application hosting on your private cloud infrastructure, while allowing simple and non-intrusive interworking with existing backend components deployed in public cloud.
You can also tap into the extensive Cisco multi-cloud portfolio to provide complete application lifecycle support. Cisco provides the ability to interconnect any workload from wherever it is deployed by utilizing segment routing and Cisco ACI.
Enabling all wireline, wireless, and business services to traverse a segment routing (SR) or SRv6-enabled network is one of the underlying principles of the Cisco WAN strategy. Segment routing is one of the key enablers of network slicing in the transport network. It allows for different transport characteristics such as low latency, to be assigned to different transport slices via features such as Flex-Algorithm.
Security
To protect your environment and mitigate risk, Cisco has a full suite of security service offerings and all routing platforms have built-in security features, extending protections up through the layers. Cisco security solutions are unique in the industry because they share security contexts and threat information between themselves and third parties. This allows faster detection and mitigation; even for threats in the encrypted layer - without the need for decryption. They harness the power of TALOS’ intelligence, the industry’s leading threat intelligence feed, which flows to each one of the Cisco security products.
Automation, Orchestration and Assurance
The Cisco Automation, Orchestration and Assurance layer spans the entire architecture and is critical for enabling cross-domain services. It includes the Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), a software package for automating service orchestration across Cisco and third-party hardware in both traditional and virtualized networks. NSO lets you add, change, and delete services in real time without disrupting overall service operations using standards-based Netconf and Yang interfaces.
To help you control costs and manage your environment more efficiently, the Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC) gives you sophisticated tools to manage your services and component Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) across their entire lifecycle.
It provides support for onboarding and deploying new VNFs, monitoring performance health, scaling up and down instances in response to demand, and helping to automatically remediate issues.
Another powerful management tool, Cisco Evolved Programable Network Manager (EPNM), is designed for element and network management systems. It offers simplified lifecycle management for carrier-grade networks of all sizes. It lets you improve agility and operational efficiencies through automated device operations, fast provisioning, and proactive assurance.
For strategic insight and visibility, Cisco Crosswork software helps you plan, design, implement, operate, and optimize your network. It delivers insights and awareness, augmented intelligence, and proactive control for a comprehensive data-driven, intent-based networks.