SReXperts 24: Key Takeaways
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This year's Nokia SReXperts conference, held in Las Vegas, NV, once again provided key insights into the future of IP and optical networking solutions that Nokia brings to market.
Here are key takeaways from two of our experts who attended the event.
The 7705 SAR is finally getting an update
Vach Kompella, leader of Nokia's IP Networks Division, announced that the extremely popular and long-lived 7705 Service Aggregation Router will be replaced towards the end of 2025. The 7705 is widely deployed in specific verticals that require legacy slow-speed interfaces, such as utilities. Nokia didn't provide too many details on what the replacement will look like, but they did hint that its replacement will have more throughput capability, in order for it to better match with the rest of Nokia's edge routing lineup.
Increasing adoption of Modern-Driven CLI
Last year at the 2023 SReXperts conference, Nokia announced that the Model-Driven Command Line Interface, or MD-CLI, will become the default mode of SR-OS, their unified routing software. The intent behind that shift was to help accelerate the industry's move towards more programmable and automated interfaces. This year, the 2024 conference saw many supporting tools being released to help customers who previously used the traditional command line interface begin their adoption of MD-CLI. This includes a new "MD-CLI Explorer" tool which will be available as part of each software release starting with 24.10.
FP4 routers get updated linecards to achieve FP5 capabilities
Jeff Jakab, Vice President of Hardware Products, described an upcoming offering that expands the capabilities of deployed 7750 Service Routers that use Nokia's custom FP4 chips (the previous generation to the current FP5 chips). These FP4-based routers are getting updated linecards with a specialized chip Nokia calls "E5" that provides capabilities and features that previously required newer FP5-based routers. These capabilities include 800GE port speeds, line-rate MACsec, and FlexE 2.0. By using the E5-powered MDA's, organizations can continue to leverage their FP4 investments while expanding to these more modern capabilities. This development is in line with Nokia's long history of providing robust investment protection.
…and AI, of course
Aside from these concrete, specific announcements, Nokia more broadly maintained a heavy focus on AI and AI-driven workflows throughout the conference. It's clear that Nokia is making heavy investments into both utilizing AI within their products as well as developing network solutions that enable organizational AI transformation in the coming years. NSP (Nokia's Network Services Platform) is at the forefront of this investment strategy, as Nokia showcased multiple use-cases of NSP driving AI/ML solutions.
Network Services Platform (NSP) Update
Nokia's 2024 SReXperts brought a renewed focus on a familiar, yet powerful tool – Network Services Platform (NSP). While NSP has been in use for some time now, its adoption has typically been reserved for the Service Provider customer who operates large and complex networks. However, during this year's conference Nokia introduced a new offering of NSP for enterprise, and particularly the Utilities segment. This is a significant move that shows Nokia's determination to make NSP more of a mainstream tool by simplifying it through customization, and in turn helping to drive further adoption.
If you're not familiar with NSP, imagine the cockpit of a 747 jumbo jet, with over 10,000 switches, dials and buttons. Then imagine this is NSP! So many options and capabilities, but how do you know and use them all. It can be overwhelming for the most experienced operator. Now, imagine that same 747 cockpit again, but this time you only need to know or be aware of 200 buttons and switches. This is the new NSP per segment – tailored to the Utilities segment for its first offering. The UX is specifically tailored with targeted dashboards, relevant reports and a custom focused, reduced content menu. The onboarding process will also be streamlined for enterprise making the whole experience to get up and running as fast as possible.
Lastly, as part of this new offering Nokia has also introduced a new "small" sizing that supports up to 300 NEs. Previously only a "large" or "medium" sizing was available, which requires a much greater resource commitment (cost) when it comes to the hardware needed to run the application.
In bringing these new options to the table, Nokia has significantly increased their opportunities for customer sales through greater adoption of the NSP product by customizing, simplifying and providing a scaled down, sizing option to attract new interest.