Cisco touts network virtualization

 

By enabling virtualization in the network and not just the data center, Patel said Cisco is helping operators figure out how to better manage a growing number of devices connected to the Internet. That's critical, as Cisco’s VNI Forecast predicts that by 2015, there will be twice as many devices connected to the global Internet as people living in the world. With Cisco's IPv6-enabled network virtualization technology, operators will have enough IP addresses to reach multiple devices.

 

Cisco may have won the most kudos for its nV technology, which is aimed at helping operators manage aggregation routers more easily. Cox’s 100 ASR 9000s are located in 18 cities, and right now they’re all managed locally, Rolls said.

 

“Operationally that’s not the best model, so as we look to bring more centralized management to those devices, to the degree that this brings one-touch management, it would be good to have one way to manage these devices, not 18 ways,” he added.

 

For operators ready to upgrade, the 9922 would be a logical replacement for Cisco’s 7600 Series edge routers. “It’s been a workhorse for many years, but it will never go to 100G or have terabit capacity,” said Hunt, of Current Analysis.

 

 

No matter what high-capacity equipment is available, network operators still face the unsolved problem of monetizing all the content traversing their networks, since revenue per bit has dropped steadily for the past five years. Unless they figure out how to address that, newer edge routers won’t alleviate their pain point.

 

Cisco’s ASR 9000 upgrades may address growing capacity issues that providers face, but it can’t touch the traffic monetization issue. Without that solution, spending even more on gear to handle video efficiently makes the ROI look bad.

 

“Building a network for the traffic load isn’t the problem; monetizing that content load is,” said telecom consultant Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. Service providers that take part in CIMI Corp. surveys say they aren’t asking vendors for help in how to carry more traffic, Nolle said; instead, they're looking for help in figuring out how to monetize it.

 

“If your customer’s problem is how to create new services at a higher network level, this is an ecosystem problem, not an individual product problem. The day of the network box is gone, " Nolle said. "So Cisco may be going back to basics, but if they’re abandoning the notion of helping providers offer advanced services, they’re throwing the baby out with the bath water."

 

Cisco’s Patel points out, however, that the ASR 9000v and 9922 will provide a platform for monetizing operator services. Whether that’s the kind of help service providers are looking for remains to be seen.

 

Pointing to Alcatel-Lucent’s gains in the edge routing and switching market, Nolle notes that Alcatel-Lucent’s gear doesn’t have nearly the capacity that Cisco’s does, but Alcatel-Lucent spends a lot of time working on application delivery and service-layer issues that have high resonance with network operators.