Cisco Broadband Access Center – What’s New in Release 4.2 Data Sheet
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Cisco BAC Overview
Cisco announces Cisco® Broadband Access Center (BAC) 4.2. Cisco BAC provides a centralized and automated subscriber device management system for service providers to control and configure home gateways and the IP devices behind the gateways.
The Cisco BAC platform is highly scalable and reliable, with industry-leading performance. It supports multiple technologies and devices including DOCSIS® and PacketCable™, as well as providing the extensibility to support customer proprietary devices. With this new release BAC now fully supports Linux on Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS™), significantly lowering startup and administrative costs.
Benefits
Cisco BAC offers the following key benefits:
● Reliability: Cisco BAC provides high reliability and high availability, supporting autonomous headends, multiple distributed device provisioning engines (DPEs), each of which includes its own data-caching repository, a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server, and a time-of-day (ToD) server. During central server outages or communication problems, Cisco BAC provides continued service to existing registered subscribers.
● Scalability and performance: Cisco BAC can support up to 60 million devices in distributed deployments. Cisco BAC uses multiple distributed device management and caching engines to balance processing of device requests. A single DPE can support as many as 2 million devices. These DPEs can be combined in groups to provide redundancy, load sharing, and disaster recovery. The regional distribution unit (RDU) is a central component used to manage service requests and modifications. A single RDU server in conjunction with the appropriate number of DPE groups can support as many as 60 million devices with a sustained rate of hundreds of thousands of new devices a day.
● Integration with current systems: Cisco BAC integrates with existing service provider systems, such as billing systems, operations support systems (OSSs), and other customer management systems, through a Java provisioning API.
● Extendable technology support: Cisco BAC supports DOCSIS cable modems and set-top boxes for high-speed data provisioning, PacketCable voice provisioning of media termination adapters (MTAs) and DOCSIS cable modems. It also can be extended to support other Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)-based devices, including non-DOCSIS cable modems.
New in Cisco BAC 4.2 Release
● Full support for Linux and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS): Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Cisco UCS support is now extended to all components of the BAC product including RDU and Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC). This feature completes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Cisco UCS support for BAC.
● Operational Flexibility with File Naming Enhancements: Users can apply various tags for naming dynamically generated files, providing operational flexibility.
Table 1 lists the key features of Cisco BAC 4.2.
Table 1. Key Features of Cisco Broadband Access Center 4.2
| Enhancements and New Features |
Description |
| Full support for Linux and Cisco Unified Computing System |
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Cisco UCS support is now extended to all components of BAC product including RDU and KDC. |
| Integrated Kerberos Protocol server (KDC) for PacketCable voice service provisioning |
Provides a single platform with all the necessary security components for PacketCable provisioning. |
| Linux and Cisco UCS support for provisioning group |
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Cisco UCS support for provisioning group components - DPE, Cisco Network Registrar DHCP, and Cisco Network Registrar DNS. |
| DOCSIS 3.0 and IPv6 support |
DOCSIS 3.0 channel-bonding allows increased data speed for subscribers. Support for IPv4 and IPv6 cable modems and IPv4/IPv6 mixed device environment. |
| Distributed architecture with high availability and disaster recovery |
Allows a simple way to extend provisioning to additional subscribers and new markets; dramatically simplifies capacity upgrade and maintenance costs and complexity. Distributed provisioning engines allow you to put them in different data centers for disaster recovery. |
| Java-based provisioning API |
Provides easy integration to customer OSS, billing, or workflow and mediation software. |
| Scripting Interface with templates |
The BAC scripting interface provides more flexibility for managing template parameters and an automated way for deploying templates. |
| Technology extensions |
Provides an easy means to extend this single platform to provision new devices and technologies to meet changing network and subscriber requirements. |
| PacketCable compliant |
Supports PacketCable 1.0, 1.1, and 1.5 for complete end-to-end IP voice service provisioning and meets all PacketCable security specifications. |
| Dynamic DOCSIS file generation |
Offers a means to build unique DOCSIS files for individual subscriber devices to meet needs of tiered service provisioning and true IP voice requirements. |
| Safe failover |
High uptime and service reliability through DPE and DHCP failover as well as TFTP redundancy. |
Availability
Cisco Broadband Access Center 4.2 will be available in August 2011.
Ordering Information
Table 2 provides ordering information for Cisco Broadband Access Center 4.2.
Table 2. Part Numbers and Descriptions
| Part Number |
Description |
| BAC-BASE-4.2-K9 |
Cisco BAC software components (RDU software, Cisco Network Registrar software, Kerberos Protocol server [KDC] software) |
| BAC-SVS-10K= |
10,000 subscriber service license |
| BAC-SVS-10K |
10,000 subscriber service license |
| BAC-SVS-500K= |
500,000 subscriber service license |
| BAC-SVS-500K |
500,000 subscriber license |
| BAC-DPE-4.2 |
BAC license for single device provisioning engine |
| BAC-DPE-4.2= |
BAC license for single device provisioning engine |
| L-BAC-DPE-4.2= |
BAC license for single device provisioning engine |
More Information
For additional product information, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/bac or contact your local Cisco account representative.
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