Ten billion mobile devices will populate our planet by 20161, and this proliferation in mobility is promoting the need for wireless connectivity. Businesses are compelled to open their networks and provide customers with wireless network connectivity, presenting tremendous potential as well as unique challenges. The Cisco® Mobility Services Engine (MSE) is the single network device that enables businesses to realize unprecedented benefits from the BYOD revolution as well as mitigate the risks involved.
The Cisco MSE is a platform that enables the wireless network to deliver mobility services in a centralized and scalable way. The MSE delivers the following mobility services:
• Location services: Increases visibility into the network by capturing and consolidating crucial information about RF spectrum, sources of RF interference, and devices and users on the network. Cisco MSE extends and enhances the capabilities of Cisco CleanAir® technology. Location services also enable a rich set of real-time location services (RTLS).
• Advanced location services: Enables enterprises and service providers to deliver customized location-based mobile services to end users to use location analytics to gain insights into end-user behavior while in their venue.
• Wireless intrusion prevention system (WIPS): Protects the network from wireless threats, rogue wireless devices, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks to improve security and meet compliance objectives.
The MSE is available as a physical (Figure 1) or a virtual appliance.
Figure 1. Cisco MSE Physical Appliance
To deliver true business mobility, IT must take a practical approach focused on unifying networks, managing the wave of mobile devices, and enabling mobile application development. The Cisco MSE is at the heart of this mobility architecture evolution. It provides an open API that allows a broad ecosystem of partners to access network intelligence in developing industry-relevant mobility solutions. The MSE is part of Cisco Unified Access, delivering a comprehensive approach to business mobility: an approach that extends applications to the right device at the right time, no matter which network is being used.
Product Architecture
The Cisco MSE provides the following architectural elements:
• A common API framework
• A common management plane for services design, deployment, and operation (monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting)
– Management of services provided by the Cisco PI
• Scalable infrastructure to support the instantiation of additional services
– Architecture allows services to span across multiple MSEs to facilitate flexibility in deployment
• Loose coupling among services
– Facilitates easy integration into framework (plug and play)
– Message-based collaboration service-oriented architecture (SOA) model, in which individual services can be managed independently without affecting others
• Integrated with the Cisco Unified Access
Figure 2 shows the Cisco MSE architecture.
Figure 2. MSE Architecture
Product Specifications
Table 1 lists product specifications for the Cisco MSE. Table 2 lists specifications for the Cisco MSE Virtual Appliance. Table 3 lists scaling details for Location Services, Advanced Location Services and aWIPS on Cisco 3355 MSE or Cisco MSE Virtual Appliance.
• Cisco UCS® C460 M2 rack mount server (high-end virtual appliance)
– Two Intel Xeon(R) CPU E7-L8867 @ 2.13GHz
– Disk system throughput: Minimum of 1600 IOPS with a bandwidth of 6000 Kbytes/sec
• Cisco UCS C250 M2 rack mount server (standard virtual appliance)
– Two Intel Xeon(R) CPU E5570 @ 2.93GHz
– Disk system throughput: Minimum of 1100 IOPS with a bandwidth of 4000 Kbytes/sec
• Cisco UCS C250 M2 rack mount server (low-end virtual appliance)
– One Intel Xeon(R) CPU E5570 @ 2.93GHz
– Disk system throughput: Minimum of 900 IOPS with a bandwidth of 3000 Kbytes/sec
Table 3. Scaling Details for Cisco MSE 3355 and Cisco MSE Virtual Appliance
Small deployments can run multiple services on the same appliance, i.e. for Cisco MSE 3355 less than 200 AP with Location Services; for Cisco MSE High-End Virtual Appliance less than 500 AP with Location Services. For larger deployments, it is recommended using separate MSE appliances for each service.
Appliance
Location Services
Advanced Location Services
aWIPS
Cisco MSE 3355
500 AP
500 AP
0
Cisco MSE 3355
0
0
5,000 AP
Cisco MSE 3355
200 AP
200 AP
3,000 AP
Cisco MSE High-End Virtual Appliance
1,000 AP
1,000 AP
0
Cisco MSE High-End Virtual Appliance
0
0
10,000 AP
Cisco MSE High-End Virtual Appliance
500 AP
500 AP
5,000 AP
Cisco MSE Standard Virtual Appliance
360 AP
360 AP
0
Cisco MSE Standard Virtual Appliance
0
0
5,000 AP
Cisco MSE Standard Virtual Appliance
180 AP
180 AP
2,500 AP
Cisco MSE Low-End Virtual Appliance
40 AP
40 AP
0
Cisco MSE Low-End Virtual Appliance
0
0
2,000 AP
Cisco MSE Low-End Virtual Appliance
20 AP
20 AP
1,000 AP
Summary
The Cisco MSE is a platform that enables the wireless network to deliver mobility services in a centralized and scalable way. The MSE delivers location services, advanced location services, and adaptive WIPS. The open API of the MSEs enables Cisco partners to use the capabilities of the network to deliver business-relevant solutions.
