Cisco nV Technology

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, network operators will deliver upwards of a zettabyte (1021 bytes) of data to 15 billion fixed and mobile devices by 2015. That will be the challenge of the Next-Generation Internet.

To meet that challenge, service providers will need networks that meet the following requirements:

• Support for mobile, business and residential services over a converged infrastructure
• Unprecedented scale and density
• High service availability
• Increased service velocity
• Reduced network complexity

With today’s network architectures, as demand for IP services grows, the need to provision and manage huge numbers of separate physical platforms grows as well. And network capex and opex costs grow in parallel.

What if there was a way to consolidate many of those separate physical platforms? What if network providers could view hundreds or even thousands of physically distinct chasses as a single virtual node? This is the vision behind Cisco’s Network Virtualization or “nV” Technology.


Cisco nV Technology, as utilized by the new Cisco ASR 9000 System, provides two primary benefits:

• Distributed resiliency: Service providers can operate two Cisco ASR 9000 platforms as a single, virtual ASR 9000 System by logically linking two physical platforms with a shared control plane, improving availability and bandwidth utilization.
• Distributed scalability: Cisco nV technology lets operators extend Cisco ASR 9000 System capabilities using other system platforms – namely the smaller ASR 9000v, and the new ASR 901 and ASR 903 – as remote, “virtual” line cards, rather than standalone platforms. With this ability, operators can get exactly the bandwidth they need, when and where they need it, without having to separately provision hundreds of access platforms.

Cisco nV technology allows service providers to create an entirely new, virtualized transport architecture that can simplify network operations and dramatically lower costs.