Nokia unveils breakthrough IP routing portfolio, powered by advanced silicon

At a time when the demand for greater network capacity and stronger security is intensifying, Nokia is rolling out a new, breakthrough IP routing portfolio, as well as upgrades to its existing line of routers. Its new offerings surpass the competition in terms of capacity and density thanks to Nokia's new FP4 silicon -- the world's first multi-terabit chipset, up to six times more powerful than network processors shipping today.

Nokia's new 7750 Service Router (SR)-s series will be the highest-density routers on the market, leapfrogging the competition by two to three times in capacity to support a 144 Tb/s configuration in a single shelf. The routing line will ship in Q4 of this year.

Meanwhile, Nokia is upgrading its 7950 Extensible Routing System (XRS)-XC, creating a router that will scale into the petabit range. It offers 576 Tb/s in a single system through chassis extension, without requiring separate switching shelves. It's the world's highest-capacity router to date.

The new and updated routing platforms are based on the new FP4 silicon, which has been about five years in the making. With the FP4 silicon, Nokia can deliver the equivalent of six FP3 chips in a single chipset. The advancement takes Nokia from 9.6 Tb/s across an entire chassis to 12 in a single line card.

Nokia's new routing technology is the first capable of delivering terabit IP flows, a 10x improvement over the existing 100 Gb/s links that serve as the backbone of the internet.

Major factors -- namely, the shift to cloud computing and the rise of the Internet of Things -- are "forcing the internet to be re-engineered," Steve Vogelsang, CTO for Nokia's IP and optical business, said to ZDNet.

From a networking perspective, enterprise "connectivity and capacity needs are increasingly about connecting to the cloud, as well as interconnecting clouds," he said.

While internet growth has been projected to hit 40 percent a year through 2020, this shift to the cloud has accelerated that, Vogelsang added.

Meanwhile, as the number of connected devices spikes, security becomes a massive challenge. By building in security and telemetry capabilities into its new FP4 silicon, Nokia enables the deep analytics required to understand what's happening in the network and ultimately drive automated configuration. This will improve security and achieve what's known as intent-based networking.

Webscale companies in particular -- major enterprises like Google, Facebook and Amazon -- are moving into "intent-based networking." The FP4 provides fine-grained telemetry information, which goes into an analytics platform where it's combined with other data to drive optimization.

"You want to have intelligent systems... that will give you optimal performance, maximizing user experience across whatever applications and workloads are running," Vogelsang explained.

Nokia has also built capabilities within its routers, via the silicon, that can find more than 90 percent of a DDoS attack. "If you wanted to create an attack in this environment... you would need 10 times the number of attacking servers to create the same disruption," Vogelsang said.

In addition to introducing its new routing platforms, Nokia is providing an upgrade path for its existing customers. "When our customers see we've got the latest generation of silicon, that they can install that in an existing chassis and suddenly get two, three or six times the capacity, it's a huge win for them," Vogelsang said.

Selling its upgraded platforms to customers shouldn't be a problem, given that the trends in connectivity have created "pent up demand" for more capacity, Vogelsang said. Meanwhile, Nokia's new router line is opening up new opportunities to expand its customer base to include webscale companies.