Recently, in order to meet customers’ increasing demand for larger data capacity, DE-CIX has once again expanded its network capabilities and is the first in the world to provide 400GE access technology.
It is reported that this extension is based on the DE-CIX Apollon platform with Nokia router as the core component. At present, the Nokia 400GE line card has been used in the Frankfurt node of the world’s largest Internet exchange center, and will use 400GE access technology in more DE-CIX sites in the future. This means that the Nokia 7950 core router completes the world’s first 400GE commercial deployment.
Traffic surges 400GE will become the future gold standard
The successful commercial deployment of 400GE means that the global traffic growth scale has entered a new stage. In fact, in recent years, global network traffic is growing rapidly on a scale that is double or even several times a year.
Taking DE-CIX as an example, DE-CIX is serving more than 1,500 carriers, ISPs and content networks from more than 100 countries, including all leading international carriers in major cities in Europe, the Middle East, India and North America. Among them, the largest node – the highest flow rate in Frankfurt is more than 6.8TB per second.
So far, DE-CIX has provided access to GE, 10GE and 100GE for the market. Among them, 100GE access technology was first introduced in 2013, and sales in recent years have continued to grow. Compared to 2017, the 20GE order for DE-CIX increased by nearly 45% in 2018.
Eric Dole, director of infrastructure at DE-CIX, concluded, “In the next few years, we expect 400GE access technology to become the gold standard for customers with peer-to-peer bandwidth requirements.”
Six years of cooperation let 400GE take the lead
Since DE-CIX first deployed the Nokia 7950 router to launch 100GE access technology in 2013, the 7950 router has won the trust of DE-CIX with leading platform performance and stable operation performance, providing DE-CIX with rapid development of services in recent years. Full protection. Based on the good cooperation foundation of nearly 6 years, in the face of the development expectation of 400G access technology in the next few years, DE-CIX continues to choose the solution of upgrading the 7950 router to provide 400G access technology. The Nokia 7950 also lived up to expectations and successfully completed the industry’s first commercial deployment.
It is reported that Nokia 7950 router is based on the new generation of self-developed FP4 network processor chip, has been able to provide 2.4T port capacity interface line card, including 24x100GE and 6x400GE line cards, single-capacity interface capacity up to 48T, hardware technology can Fully guarantee the realization of 400GE access.
However, how to solve the power consumption problem of the 2T+ router platform is a big challenge. The FP4 is the industry’s first 16nm technology network processor chip. It solves the power consumption problem from the chip level, combined with the perfect power consumption control of the whole machine. The 7950 router is in 2.4. The power consumption on the T platform is close to that of the original 400G platform, and the capacity is increased by 6 times. The average power consumption per Gbit is the lowest in the industry, which solves the power consumption problem of large-capacity platform deployment.
After the upgrade, DE-CIX’s 7950 node can provide industry-leading single-machine router capacity, providing high-density 100G, 400G and 10G access while optimizing CAPEX and OPEX, optimal power consumption and room space. Occupancy and enjoy the advanced business performance and update capabilities based on the FP4 network processor chip to maintain the platform advancement in the industry.
At present, Nokia 7950 has been widely deployed by 64 operators around the world. Eight of the top 10 operators in China, including China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, have 7950 customers.
Preparing for the 5G era
With the 7950 FP4-based platform upgrade, the 7950 is ready for the 5G era. Nokia believes that the 5G era is also the era of the cloud and the era of the Internet of Everything. The traffic growth brought by various application requirements will drive the upgrading of the capacity/performance of the core router platform, while the functional requirements in the 5G service such as network slicing, NFV/telco cloud. The deployment of telco cloud will bring new challenges to network bearer technology.
The new network technology and architecture based on Segment routing+EVPN+SDN programmability is the solution to meet the service bearer in the 5G era. The core router naturally needs to adapt and satisfy the direction of such network evolution.
In response to these new business needs and network evolution trends, Nokia also proposed the NF-IX (network function interconnection) architecture to achieve cloud-to-cloud, user-to-cloud, cloud network collaborative automation network interconnection, the 7950 core router has achieved the evolution of the architecture under the architecture, and based on the industry’s most advanced FP4 chip to achieve platform upgrades, ready for the arrival of the 5G era.
