Cisco Network Convergence System 1002 Data Sheet

In the data center and between data centers, you need greater capacity to meet ever-increasing bandwidth demands along with a small form factor and low power usage to achieve optimal efficiency. Greater scale, agility and programmability are also needed to rapidly respond to an increasingly dynamic service environment. The Cisco Network Convergence System 1002 (NCS 1002) delivers all this and more. It uses Cisco nLight Silicon to combine multimodulation capability with soft-decision Forward Error Correction (SD FEC) to flexibly trade off transmission rate versus reach for maximum optical performance, giving up to 2Tbps in just 2RU.

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Product Features and Benefits

The Cisco NCS 1002 (Figure 1) is mechanically optimized for controlled operational environments. At 2 RU, the system supports up to 2Tbps of client and 2Tbps of trunk traffic.

The system uses a Linux kernel with the 64 bit IOS XR OS in a Linux Container (LxC) and admin plane operating in a separate LxC. It encompasses carrier-class software with a number of features such as machine-to-machine APIs based on YANG data models, streaming telemetry agent for real time, granular device monitoring and also an infrastructure for 3^rd party applications. The solution supports smart licensing for flexible pay as grow models.

The NCS 1002 has 2 redundant and field replaceable AC & DC power supply units and 3 redundant and field replaceable fans. It also provides field replaceable controller and SSD disk. See Figure 1. Each NCS 1002 unit provides 20 QSFP based clients and 8 CFP2-ACO based DWDM trunk ports.

The trunk ports are capable of two modulation formats and three data rates:

●    250-Gbps coherent polarization-multiplexed 16-state quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM)

●    200-Gbps coherent polarization-multiplexed 16-state quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM)

●    100-Gbps coherent polarization-multiplexed differential Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (PM-QPSK)

The NCS 1002 provides four “slices” of I/O management. Each slice contains up to twenty 10Gbe or five 40Gbe/100Gbe client ports. The client ports map to two trunk ports operating at 100G, 200G or 250Gbps DWDM, providing transponder or muxponder functionality. The modulation format of each trunk port is software-configurable per slice.

The Cisco NCS 1002 system provides the following hardware benefits:

●    Transport of 100, 200, or 250-Gbps wavelengths on the same platform through software provisioning.

●    Transport of 10GE, 40GE and 100GE on the same platform through software provisioning.

●    250G DWDM provides unparalleled scale and density. With 96 channels of 250G at 50 Ghz, the NCS 1002 provides 24Tbps in 24RU.

●    Grid-less tuning support for flex-grid DWDM support.

●    CFP2-ACO trunk DWDM optics with Cisco’s on-board coherent DSP provides a flexible Pay As You Grow model.

●    20% Soft Decision (SD) Forward Error Correction (FEC) algorithms for maximum optical performance.

Enhanced Forward Error Correction Capability

The Cisco NCS 1002 supports multiple FEC mechanisms on its trunk interfaces. The trunk port supports two FEC modes:

●    Soft-Decision FEC with 7-percent overhead

●    Soft-Decision FEC with 20-percent overhead

The SD FEC employs an advanced differential encoding and cycle slip-aware algorithm offering excellent performance and robustness against high cycle slip rates.

Multiple Modulation Schemes

The Cisco NCS 1002 features a software configurable modulation scheme per slice, allowing the operator to customize the spectral efficiency and reach characteristics of individual wavelengths. Compared to 100-Gbps PM-QPSK, PM-16QAM modulation doubles the spectral efficiency, transmitting 200 or 250-Gbps per wavelength while reducing unregenerated reach. Supported modulation formats are detailed in Table 1.

Table 1.        Supported Modulation Formats

Wavelength Tunability

The line interface supports software-provisionable tunability across the full C band, covering 96 channels on the 50-GHz grid. Grid-less tuning support allows for continuous tunability in increments of 0.1 GHz and the ability to create multicarrier superchannels over flex spectrum line systems.

Protocol Transparency

The Cisco NCS 1002 can transparently deliver 10Gbe, 40Gbe and 100Gbe over a 100-Gbps, 200-Gbps, or 250-Gbps wavelength. Table 2 shows transponder/muxponder client options and mapping.

Table 2.        Client Options and Mapping

Table 3 lists the allowable combinations of the client to DWDM trunk port mapping per slice.

Table 3.        NCS 1002 Client to Trunk Mapping Configurations Per Slice

Encryption

With increasing asks for data privacy and data protection across the globe, encryption of any data that leaves the Data Center facility is becoming an important requirement for cloud operators. The NCS1002 provides AES256 based MACSec encryption for 10GE, 40GE and 100GE clients. The MACSec Key Agreement protocol runs over a GCC (Generic Communication Channel) between two NCS1000 nodes. Pre Shared Keys (PSK) or EAP-TLS can be used to provide keys to NCS1000 devices in the network.

Management

The Cisco NCS 1002 provides comprehensive management capabilities to support Operations, Administration, Maintenance, and Provisioning (OAM&P) capabilities through IOS-XR CLI, SNMP, Syslog, and XML. In addition, iPXE for automated software download and Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) for automated configuration download are available for simplified installation. For machine-to-machine configuration and management of NCS 1002, NETCONF, RESTCONF and gRPC transport mechanisms with JSON, XML and GPB encoding are provided. The NCS 1002 provides a set of native YANG models as well as the ability to map into any industry standard such as OpenConfig or customer defined YANG data models. For monitoring, NCS 1002 provides a streaming telemetry feature that relies on a push mechanism to disseminate user selected PM and status information at user specified frequencies at granular 30 second intervals. This improves monitoring speed and scale compared to traditional pull based mechanisms such as SNMP.

Performance Monitoring

The Cisco NCS 1002 supports performance monitoring of optical parameters on the client and DWDM line interface including laser bias current, transmit and receive optical power. Ethernet RMON statistics for the client ports and OTN error counters for the trunk are also available. Calculation and accumulation of the performance-monitoring data are supported in 15-minute and 24-hour intervals as per G.7710. Physical system parameters measured at the wavelength level, such as mean polarization mode dispersion, accumulated chromatic dispersion, pre-FEC Bit Error Rate and received Optical Signal-to-Noise Ratio (OSNR) are also included in the set of performance-monitoring parameters. These parameters can greatly simplify troubleshooting operations.

The NCS 1002 provides a set of port and system LEDs for a quick visual check of the operational status. The various LEDs are described in detail in Table 9. The NCS 1002 also supports intelligent breakout panels like the Fiber Mountain^® LS-2520 https://www.fibermountain.com/index.php/products/sdn-intelligent-cabling/qsfp-breakout-for-cisco-ncs1002. These panels allow for simpler management of 10GE client ports in the field through clean mapping of breakout fibers to ports on the NCS 1002 and LEDs to reflect status of the remote QSFP+ 10GE port.

Headless Operation

The headless operation allows for NCS 1002 data plane to operate errorless during software upgrades and when the controller card is either physically absent or in a failed state. Trunk and client statistics will be accumulated and will be available to the user once the controller is up. In addition, fault propagation will continue to operate for client and trunk failures without the presence of the controller module.

Feature Summary

The following table summarizes the features of the NCS 1002.

Table 4.        Feature Summary

Regulatory Compliance

Table 5 lists regulatory compliance information for the trunk card. Note that all compliance documentation may not be completed at the time of product release. Please check with your Cisco sales representative for countries other than Canada, the United States, and the European Union.

Table 5.        Regulatory Compliance

Table 6 provides the DWDM specifications, Table 7 details receive-side optical performances, Table 8 lists performance-monitoring parameters, Table 10 provides card specifications, Table 10 gives ordering information.

Table 6.        DWDM Specifications

Table 7.        DWDM Receive-Side Optical Performances

Table 8.        Performance-Monitoring Parameters

Table 9.        NCS 1002 Specifications

Table 10.      Ordering Information

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