NCS540 Good Middle of the Road Box
June 12, 2019

NCS540 Good Middle of the Road Box

Ben Wiechman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco 500 Series Network Convergence System (NCS 500)

Two primary use cases: 1)10G port aggregation at the SP edge (RPHY aggregation, 10G E-UNI/NNI ports, access aggregation) where higher 10G port density is required than is possible on the ASR9001 routers we typically have installed in a CO location. 2) POP router for small POP expansions with unknown growth potential. Reasonable trade-off between port density and cost, especially in greenfield deployments with unknown market potential.
  • Pay as you grow
  • Operating system is consistent with other establish equipment (IOS-XR) — using primarily NCS540
  • Support for 25G port speeds
  • MPLS feature set on NCS520
  • Full support for RFC2544, Y.1564 across the product line
  • Greater clarity of the impact of smaller buffers on NCS540 when compared to other Qumran chipsets — some use cases like RPHY aggregation at network core are not a good fit.
  • Better price point for network edge
  • Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000)
Higher 10G port density on NCS540
Availability of 25G/40G/100G provides greater flexibility
Good choice when full line rate is not needed
Good choice when full capabilities of ASR9000 are not required

Well suited for10G aggregation at network edge. Small managed networks such as school districts or distributed enterprise campus. Not well suited to RPHY aggregation at network core — queuing in NCS540 results in jitter and poor RPHY performance. Allow port license purchases in smaller units. Better support for SLA performance monitoring capabilities would allow use as a box for 10G aggregation for Carrier Ethernet NNI handoff.