Colt Technology Services has selected Cisco to upgrade its system-wide pan-European and Asian network to 100-Gigabit-per-second.
This network upgrade can help Colt to rapidly provide high-speed connectivity for cloud-scale, business-critical applications to its clientele including enterprises, carriers and web-centric businesses.
The upgraded network will use an end-to-end segment routing technology, which is an enhancement to IP MPLS. This can simplify and automate network operations and can also reduce operating costs significantly.
Colt claims that customers can now benefit from an infrastructure that has been specifically designed to ease the operations of digital business based on quality, speed, capacity and flexibility in meeting application-specific service quality requirements.
At present, Colt’s network infrastructure serves about 680 data centres and 24,000 on-net buildings around the world and growing.
This infrastructure can offer pre-positioned, high-capacity connectivity ready for rapid service delivery and it gives customers the ability to scale up their capacity based on their data usage requirements.
Colt chief technical officer Rajiv Datta said: “We are focused on providing customers with world-class, high-bandwidth connectivity services.
Content from our partners
“Our investment in Cisco not only delivers 100Gbps connectivity; we are able to automate the provision of services to meet the exacting demands of our customers and enable businesses of all sizes to future-proof their connectivity.”
For the new network, Cisco will use its Network Convergence System (NCS) 5500 series 
and Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 9000 platforms as the main components of an end-to-end IOS XR network with segment routing.
The network will use one of Cisco’s WAN Automation Engine that can balance distributed intelligence and centralised optimisation and programming.
Cisco Global Service Provider Senior Vice President Cedrik Neike said: “We’re delighted to be working with Colt on this initiative. We are bringing key cloud-scale networking technologies and platforms we developed with the web providers to the whole service provider industry.
“We are changing the cost model and delivery paradigm for digital services and applications.
“In selecting Cisco’s Cloud Scale Networking technologies such as the Cisco® NCS 5500 and segment routing, Colt is making a market-defining move to deliver the high bandwidth and customer experience that defines the network of the future.”
According to Cisco, its NCS 5500 Series has 100 GE ports for high-scale WAN aggregation. It is designed to scale between data centres and large enterprises, web and service provider WAN and aggregation networks.
Its ASR 9000 Series routers offer high platform density, low power consumption and virtualisation capabilities.
This series can help carriers in optimising network performance and efficiency, reducing costs and complexity and enhancing customer experiences.
