NCS5500, great price, tons of bandwidth, all the latest OS features
June 21, 2019
NCS5500, great price, tons of bandwidth, all the latest OS features
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco 5500 Series Network Convergence System (NCS 5500)
We use the NCS5508 series as our data center interconnect to aggregate multiple cages with a data center together, as well as to converge multiple physical sites together. The NCS5508 connect to other 5508's over our NCS2000/1000 DWDM infrastructure over a large metro region. They are a good price and solved our problem appropriately. They also have a huge amount of bandwidth (36x100Gb blades) and are running XR, which is great for automation.
- Large bandwidth per blade at 36x100Gb.
- IOS-XR for full functionality of automation and service provider experience.
- Great price per port when looking at the scaling opportunity.
- Horizontal blade designs are rare these days because if the gear is shipped in a rack, the blade can bend. The NCS5500's blades are horizontal.
- Not a NCS5500 specific issue, but XR has a ways to go, but will continue to grow with customer input.
- It saved us a good amount of money because the pricing model was good.
- We also saved man hours maintaining the devices by utilizing XRs automation features for configuration management.
We considered using a Juniper comparable model, but the pricing with Cisco was better, which is very important when you're building a cloud that spans the entire globe.