Cisco NCS 5500 Series 18 Ports of 100GE and 18 Ports of 40GE Base Line Card Bundle

Based on the Cisco Global Cloud Index, digitalization is projected to grow global data center and public/private cloud network traffic more than 25 percent annually, resulting in a threefold increase by 2019. To help network providers meet these challenges, the Cisco® Network Convergence System 5500 Series is built with features such as extremely high port densities, deep packet buffering, and forwarding hardware optimized for these types of deployments.

The Cisco NCS 5500 Series modular chassis provides wide variety of combo line cards to address the customer's need to use flexible interfaces and port densities along with full bandwidth utilization of the forwarding ASIC. The Cisco NCS 5500 Series also offers a cost-effective solution while being able to support up to a 1 million entries forwarding information base (FIB) scale on this base version of the line card. These line cards are capable of advanced packet forwarding, segment routing, programmable network management, and telemetry along with the robust and mature features already present in 64-bit Cisco IOS® XR Software.

The Cisco NC55-18H18F line card (Figure 1) provides 18 ports of 100G/40G and 18 ports of 40G ports for a total of 36 ports. Eighteen of the 36 ports can be upgraded to 100GE through a license on a per-port basis. This line card uses QSFP28/QSFP+ form factor transceivers and can be used in any of the NCS 5500 Series of modular chassis. This card is designed for base scale configuration needs and is supported starting with Cisco IOS XR Software Release 6.0.2.

Cisco IOS XR Software Overview

The Cisco NCS 5500 Series is powered by the industry-leading carrier-class 64-bit version of Cisco IOS XR Software designed on operational efficiency, optimized utilization, and service agility (evolved programmable network). Cisco IOS XR Software offers rich features such as iPXE boot, autoprovisioning, native support for thirdparty application hosting, machine-to-machine interface, telemetry, and flexible software package delivery.