A Quantum Leap Forward for Policy

Cisco validates new performance benchmarks: linear scale-out to 250K transactions-per-second with 75M concurrent sessions

Earlier this week Cisco introduced a number of new mobile internet innovations to help service providers deliver new and more personalized connected experiences. The mobile Internet is predicted to grow 13-fold between 2012 and 2017 with the addition of billions of connections between people, devices and objects. It is essential that service providers monetize these connections more effectively. To that end, Cisco unveiled a closed-loop strategy to show operators how to leverage their network as a business model enabler.

The first step in the strategy is to help operators unlock the data in their network – their entire portfolio of network infrastructure holds valuable information, or “data in motion.” The second step is to take that data in motion, analyze it and correlate it to extract meaning and insight. Once you have all this insight, you’ve got to do something with it. The third step in the loop is to link that intelligence to policy and business rules which can program the network to do what operators want it to do: deliver value through personalized connected experiences.

An exciting part of this strategy is Cisco® Quantum , the result of more than $1.5 billion in recent acquisitions and in-house innovation. Cisco Quantum delivers unparalleled mobile network intelligence and programmability to service providers through a suite of software solutions. One of these solutions, the Cisco® Quantum Policy Suite, is of particular note because it recently set new industry benchmarks for scale and performance as validated by independent test agency lab EANTC (European Advanced Networking Test Center).
Policy control technology is becoming a strategic control point because it serves as a link between applications and the network. The real value of data in motion comes from the ability to use that data to program granular control of the user experience – to optimize and monetize it. Legacy policy solutions (Policy 1.0) lack the scalability and flexibility to do this economically. Cisco brought in EANTC to verify that the essential aspects of Policy 2.0 — performance at scale; low latency; minimal footprint; native support for cloud architectures — are available today in one single solution. EANTC was able to validate all of Cisco’s claims set forth in the test plan. Using a real-world LTE transaction model, Quantum Policy Suite showed low latency and was able to demonstrate sustainable linear scale out up to 250,000 transactions per second, the highest independently verified rate in the industry.

EANTC Scalability and Performance Test Report: Cisco Quantum Policy Suite from Cisco Service Provider

Additional validated benchmarks included:

75 million concurrent active subscribers running 195 million simultaneous Diameter sessions – worthy of tier-one operator subscriber levels today and tomorrow.

150,000 sessions activated per second – able to handle an entire football stadium attaching to the network at once.

14 millisecond average transaction latency — predictable, reliable execution of tier-one mobile carrier use cases.

Operators are looking to replace and upgrade their existing legacy policy 1.0 installations with next generation virtualized software platforms that enable massive improvements to scalability, lower TCO, and new service creation velocity. Cisco Quantum Policy Suite is a next-generation policy management solution – a Policy 2.0 solution – that enables service providers to scale, control, monetize and personalize any service on any type of network.

If you would like to learn more about Quantum Policy Suite, or any of the Quantum family of solutions, please visit Cisco at Mobile World Congress at Hall 3, Stand #3C54

For more information:

EANTC (European Advanced Networking Test Center)

Apollo Announcement

Cisco Quantum

Quantum Policy Suite