Cisco 500 Series Network Convergence System (NCS 500)

Score4 out of 10

20 Reviews and Ratings

What is Cisco 500 Series Network Convergence System (NCS 500)?

The Cisco 500 Series Network Convergence System (NCS 500) is a highly secure and highly available access-routing platform for service providers.

1 installation of 2

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Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

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1 installation of 2

Ignacy Mikos View profile

Network Administrator in Engineering at Atman sp. z o.o. (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Cisco NCS 540 device in my Company Core-MPLS network as pe-swich. We decided to try NCS devices due to it 2 power supply offering plus very good Port and throughput coverage in really small box. After 1-2 test deployments we decided to go for it in larger scale. also due to easy configuration which can be templated.

Pros

Double power supply
Good port coverage with 40-100G plus 10G
Easy deployment

Cons

Smart licensing

Most Important Features

Port covarage
Double power supply
small box

Return on Investment

Easy to deploy
A lot of port

Alternatives Considered

Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000)

Other Software Used

Cisco 1000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 1000), Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000)

Ben Wiechman View profile

Director of Network Strategy and Engineering in Information Technology at Arvig (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

Pay as you grow
Operating system is consistent with other establish equipment (IOS-XR) — using primarily NCS540
Support for 25G port speeds

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Better price point for network edge

Alternatives Considered

Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000)

Other Software Used

Orion, Splunk Enterprise, NetBrain

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Cisco 500 series platform has been a big part of our organizations since its release. It has been used as on-prem equipment at customer site, acting as an access layer for various services. It is a very cost effective way to provide Cisco devices at that particular layer of the network.

Pros

Switching.
Routing.
Access.

Cons

Some software bugs with initial releases, seems to be resolved now.
With introduction, EOL on some similar products in the Cisco family.
OS features could be expanded.

Most Important Features

Return on Investment

Relatively low cost access layer device.
Very cost effective means of getting 10G interfaces.
Some features available on other devices out of the box are more complex or absent on the NCS without licensing or assistance.

Other Software Used

Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud), monday.com

Juniper ACX Series Routers

Cisco 500 Series Network Convergence System (NCS 500)

What is Cisco 500 Series Network Convergence System (NCS 500)?

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Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services