The new generation of Cisco NCS 5500 series 400GE line cards increases forwarding capacity of NCS 5500 by 2.7 times to a maximum of 153.6 Tbps per system.
Product overview
Based on the Cisco® Global Cloud Index, digitalization is projected to grow global data center and public/private cloud network traffic more than 25 percent annually. To help network providers meet these challenges, the Cisco Network Convergence System 5500 Series is built with features such as extremely high port densities, deep packet buffering, and forwarding hardware optimized for these types of deployments.
The Cisco NCS 5500 Series modular chassis provides a wide variety of line cards to address customer needs to use flexible interfaces and port densities, along with full bandwidth utilization of the forwarding ASIC. The latest generation of line cards, which are shipping today, will provide the capability for dense 400G interface ports with QSFP-DD optics, thus providing operators with readiness for mass-scale networking.
The new generation consists of two line cards: the base version and the scale (SE) version, which supports enhanced configuration needs with expanded Forwarding Information Base (FIB), Quality of Service (QoS), Access Control Lists (ACL), and so on. These line cards are capable of advanced packet forwarding, segment routing, programmable network management, and telemetry, along with the robust and mature features already present in 64-bit Cisco IOS® XR Software. Note that the newer generation line cards require the second-generation fabric cards and fan trays for NCS 5500 modular chassis to be installed on the system.
The new line cards are backward compatible and they can co-exist with previous generation line cards on a chassis with second-generation fabric cards and fan trays, supporting the same features and scale as the previous generation line cards. This mode of operation will be referred to as compatibility mode. On a system with only the newer line cards, referred to as native mode, the system will support richer feature set and higher feature scale and will be supported in future software releases.
The Cisco NC57-24DD line card (Figure 1) provides 24 ports of 400 GE, providing an aggregate bandwidth of 9.6 Tbps. This line card uses QSFP28 / QSFP+ / QSFP-DD transceivers and is to be used in any of the NCS 5500 series of modular chassis.
The second line card is an enhanced scale (SE) version which improves the FIB scale capabilities up to additional 4M+ routes compared to the base line card. The Cisco NC57-18DD-SE (Figure 2) provides 18 ports of 400 GE or 30 ports of 200 GE/100 GE, and provides up to 7.2 Tbps bandwidth per line card. The 18 400GE ports are the even numbered ports between port 1 and port 29 and the ports 0, 19, 21 and 23. They are highlighted in blue on the face plate of the scale line card.
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