Cisco Rolls Out New Silicon, Router for ‘Internet for the Future’

SAN FRANCISCO — Cisco rolled out new silicon, software, and optics targeting service providers at an event in San Francisco during which the networking giant unveiled its “Internet for the Future” technology strategy. SAN FRANCISCO — Cisco rolled out new silicon, software, and optics targeting service providers at an event in San Francisco during which the networking giant unveiled its “Internet for the Future” technology strategy. This strategy centers around Cisco Silicon One, a new programmable silicon architecture that the vendor claims can serve anywhere in the network and be used in any form factor. Also at the event, Cisco unveiled a router built on Silicon One and a new operating system. The new Cisco 8000 router platform aims to help service providers reduce the cost of building and operating internet-scale networks, which becomes especially relevant as operators prepare massive 5G rollouts in 2020, said CEO Chuck Robbins. “The technology that we brought forward today will enable 5G to realize the potential that has been talked about for the last six or seven years,” Robbins said, adding that Cisco spent nearly $1 billion over the last five years developing the new technology. Cisco’s Internet for the Future strategy follows declining service providers sales — its service provider revenue dropped 13% year over year in the most recent earnings quarter. The new silicon architecture and platform should help turn this around, said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research. “It’s good to see Cisco focused on this market,” he said. “They haven’t had a new service provider platform in five years, and it’s fair to say they’ve fallen behind.” But the new router should help operators avoid the bandwidth issues they experienced with 4G LTE as they build their 5G networks, Kerravala said. And Cisco’s investment in optics technology will play a key role moving forward as well, he added. “Integrated optics is eventually going to be the norm,” he said. “If you’re in the [service provider] space today, and you don’t own your optics, you’re going to be on the outside looking in.” The 8000 Series platform “certainly is light years ahead of where Juniper is, and from a speed perspective [Cisco] is on par with Nokia or maybe slightly ahead,” he added. Cisco claims that Silicon One is the first routing silicon to break 10 Tb/s with a single ASIC, and it provides two-times more network bandwidth in a single ASIC than any other routing silicon. It also provides more packets per second than any other programmable silicon, Cisco says. The platform comes with built-in deep buffering, and the vendor claims the routing silicon provides the same level of bandwidth and power-efficiency performance as switching silicon’s performance — and promises even faster performance gains in the future. A study by ACG Research found that the 8000 Series router, combined with Cisco’s Crosswork Network Automation software, has a five-year total cost of ownership savings of 87% compared to first-generation routers and 66% savings over second-generation routers. “The timing could be very important because there were a lot of mistakes made by telcos and the 4G deployments where they didn’t consider the economics on backhaul,” said Ray Mota, CEO and principal analyst at ACG Research. “So now that we move to 5G you have companies like Sprint and a few others finding out that they’re getting three- to five-times more traffic than actually expected. In the U.S. and North America, the premiums for pricing aren’t any higher,” which means operators need to become more efficient through increased automation. “This is the first step in the right direction as 5G starts taking off.” Cisco worked with Google Cloud to develop the new silicon, and Cisco said it started shipping the platform to early customers in October. STC, a telecom services provider in the Middle East and Northern Africa, is the first customer to deploy the 8000 Series routers. The platform is also in trials with Comcast, AT&T, and NTT Communications. “When David [Goeckeler, EVP and GM of Cisco’s Networking and Security Business] a few weeks back asked me if I am ready to support new silicon, performance, power, etc., with programmability, I said yeah I’ll sign up,” said Noam Raffaeli, SVP of network engineering at Comcast, at the event. Cisco is “doubling down on silicon investment, which is extremely important for us and for the ecosystem of service providers.” Cisco also partnered with Facebook and Microsoft, and in addition to running Cisco’s own operating system the new routing platform will also support SONiC and SAI. Microsoft co-developed the open source Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification, which it open sourced to the Open Compute Project (OCP) in 2015, as well as the Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC), which it contributed to OCP in 2016. The third pillar of Cisco’s Internet for the Future strategy focuses on its optics technology. As port rates increase from 100G to 400G and beyond, optics become a larger portion of the cost to build and operate internet infrastructure. “We have to be investing in optics,” said Bill Gartner, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Optical Systems and Optics Group. “We can’t ignore what will be 70% of the cost.” Cisco started investing in optics technology back in 2010 with its CoreOptics acquisition. Two years later it bought another optics company, Lightwire. It then acquired Luxtera in late 2018, and most recently paid $2.6 billion for Acacia in a deal expected to close by the end of the year. To address the economics of optics, Cisco says it will ensure that as router and switch port rates continue to increase its optics will meet the industry’s reliability and quality standards. It also pledged that its optics will operate in Cisco, white box, and third-party vendors’ hosts.