Guest Blog by Leonard Luna, Marketing Manager

Cisco recently announced a new solution that will be instrumental in the network digitization transformation era: Software Innovations for Cloud Scale Networking. These enable service providers and web companies to deliver cloud applications with greater agility, automation and simplicity, while reducing the operational cost of the networks that support them. Integral to this solution, Cisco introduced three new platform series to its Network Convergence System (NCS) family of solutions: two new small-form-factor, high density routers designed to efficiently scale between data centers and large enterprise, web and service provider WAN and aggregation networks -the NCS 5000 and NCS 5500 series, and a third transport solution, the industry's first 1 Terabit per rack unit (RU) optical platform -the NCS 1000 Data Center Interconnect series.

Digitization -the digital transformation of processes across enterprises, small and medium businesses, and all the way out to the consumer, is having a profound effect on the overall service provider business and their network architectures. According toCisco's Global Cloud Index Forecast (2014 -2019). By 2019:

• 86% of all workloads will be in the cloud
• Traffic traversing data centers will increase 3-fold to 10.4 Zettabytes
• Workload density in the cloud will outpace traditional data centers more than 2.5-fold

This is driving the need for automation, agility and scale.

The Cisco NCS 1000 was designed in direct response to the rapid move towards digitization across networks, and the expanding role and impact of data centers and the clouds they support across global markets. The first platform in this series is the NCS 1002, a two RU solution that provides 2 Tb/s of capacity using just eight wavelengths, capable of connecting data centers thousands of kilometers apart.  To support the immense operational demands of digitization and cloud scale networking, the NCS 5000, NCS 5500 and NCS 1000 are all designed to support Cisco IOS XR innovations that deliver software modularity and extensibility, automation, visibility and control.

In this video, Bill Gartner, Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's Optical and Transceiver Business Unit, explains the genesis for this innovative optical solution, specifically designed for data center environments. Learn more about the NCS 1000.

While the scale associated with cloud and digitization significantly out paces the scale in metro networks, the past few years has seen an accelerated migration to 100G and beyond transport in the metro.

To learn more about this metro trend and the associated innovations, we invite you to attend the December 9^th, 2015 IHS Infonetics Research webinar -The Metro 100G Coherent Evolution  at 8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 16:00 UTC. Panelists will include Ron Johnson, Director of Architecture and Product Management, Cisco.