At MWC 2014 (Mobile World Congress), Barcelona, Cisco announced that its Cisco Quantum Virtualized Packet Core has passed portability testing with Berlin-based European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC).
Quantum vPC is a software solution of the new Cisco Evolved Services Platform that virtualizes key capabilities of the Cisco Aggregation Service Router (ASR) 5000 Series.
Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Mobility Business Group, Cisco, said: “Cisco is committed to virtualizing our service provider networking technologies where and when it makes sense for our customers.”
This functionality test emphasized that mobile Internet intelligence capabilities can be extended by service providers in their networks and allow them to offer a range of new services such as machine-to-machine (M2M) and sponsored data.
The EANTC functionality tests involved 4G and 3G radio-access technologies using IPv4 and IPv6 and simulating the equivalent of 10,000 end users.
The EANTC tests confirmed that the virtualized and physical evolved packet core (EPC) solution that supports the same features and functions as the Cisco Quantum vPC is completely hypervisor and hardware independent.
The tests also confirmed that the Cisco Quantum vPC uses the same management software and interface that supports integrated services, such as network address translation, firewall and deep packet inspection.
EANTC also confirmed that the same 4G and 3G calls that are supported by the Cisco ASR 5000 Series are also supported by the virtual implementation and verified that functions such as high availability with session recovery, deep packet inspection and firewall/ network address translation worked as expected in the Cisco Unified Computing System-based virtual implementation.
Such capabilities means that more than 300 service providers running the Cisco ASR 5000 Series can bypass the information technology integration costs normally associated with migration to a virtual environment, and simply extend the same code, functions and services to virtual implementations while continuing to work in a near seamless fashion with existing and new Cisco ASR 5000 Series infrastructure.
