The Cisco QuantumFlow Processor: Cisco’s Next Generation Network Processor

Thanks for visiting the Lippis Report. We provide access to thousands of industry white papers, case studies, presentations and podcasts, all you need to do is register. Enjoy!

 Watch a video message from Nick Lippis.

By Cisco Systems

Cisco realized five years ago that the network edge was changing. The existing network-processor design would not be sufficient to meet the needs of exploding video traffic growth and emerging collaborative applications, nor meet the need for borderless networking where any service could be offered securely anywhere in the network. General-purpose processors enabled flexible network services and rapid feature development but lacked traffic prioritization mechanisms and suffered from slow forwarding performance. Over the last few years, faster network-processor technology became a mainstream technology that is more than doubling annually. Even in the past few years however, many of the multi-core network processors available offered high throughputs but limited service flexibility with fixed feature pipeline processing and inflexible classification and packet-processing programming languages. The Cisco QuantumFlow Processor takes network-processor technology to the next level by moving away from other rigid forms of processing technology to one of true massively parallel and flexible flow processing for classification, services integration, and traffic management.