Cisco Network Convergence System
With internet traffic rapidly growing amid new waves of cloud, mobile, video, and machine-to-machine applications, Cisco introduced the Network Convergence System (NCS) — a network fabric family designed to serve as the foundation of a massively scalable, smarter, and more adaptable internet. Leading global service providers, including BSkyB (Sky), KDDI, and Telstra, deployed the Cisco NCS to create new revenue streams, simplify operations, and deliver personalised experiences to customers.
The NCS's programmability and virtualisation capabilities help service providers accelerate the transition to software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV), enabling networks to scale bandwidth, compute, and control functions to manage policies and respond to demand in real time.
Industry-leading capabilities
The NCS family, with more than 100 patents, joins the Cisco Carrier Routing System (CRS) and Aggregation Services Router (ASR) families as a foundational network fabric, delivering:
Scale: Built for petabit-scale performance, capable of supporting trillions of events across a connected fabric.
Agility: The industry's first carrier-grade, programmable convergence system designed for advanced virtualisation, extending, connecting, controlling, and responding to applications, networks, and data centres in real time.
Efficiency: When deployed as part of the Cisco ONE Service Provider Architecture, the NCS family can help network operators reduce total cost of ownership while consuming significantly less power.
Key breakthroughs
The NCS features the Cisco nPower X1 integrated network processor, delivering new levels of performance, functionality, programmability, and scale. It converges IP and optical networks, integrating with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Dynamic Fabric Automation to act as a flexible foundational network fabric for an evolved, programmable network.
Its advanced virtualisation capabilities let the system orchestrate services and resources across disparate physical, virtual, and geographical elements as if part of a single unified system, enabling service providers to elastically scale network and compute resources.
The NCS family
NCS 6000: Featuring the industry's first 1 Tbps line card, capable of transporting up to 5 Tbps per slot and 1.2 Pbps per system, supporting a converged IP and optical environment.
NCS 4000: Supporting 400 Gbps per slot and 6.4 Terabits per system, available in single, back-to-back, and multi-chassis configurations, supporting optical transport network (OTN), DWDM, SONET, and Ethernet applications.
NCS 2000: Connecting DWDM transport networks at rates of 100 Gbps and beyond, supporting dynamic network configurability with next-generation intelligent ROADM capabilities.