NCS 540 Flexible Consumption Model software licenses

Cisco IOS XR Software Flexible Consumption Model Data Sheet

• The Cisco Flexible Consumption Model is comprised of three main parts as shown in Figure 1. The hardware is the first part in the model and represents the intrinsic value of hardware. Traditionally, software licenses are perpetual and attached to specific hardware with no ability to resue the license on next generation hardware. With the Flexible Consumption Model, the software layer is broken out into perpetual software Right-to-Use (RTU) licenses, the second part, and ongoing Software Innovation Access (SIA) subscriptions, the third part.
• RTU perpetual software licenses ride on top of the hardware and involves two simple software suites, Essentials Software and Advanced Software, common license suites across an entire product family. Some products have optional “a la carte” software perpetual licenses for specialized platform specific features. This model was created to provide the software solution at the overall network level as opposed to just a single router. SIA, in addition to providing software feature upgrades, allows RTU software licenses to be shared across the Flexible Consumption Model network from a common license pool or port them to a next-generation router.
• The Flexible Consumption Model is comprised of two software suites as shown in Figure 2. The Essentials software suite is for basic transport applications, while the Advanced software suite is for enhanced applications and network resiliency. The Essentials software suite is required for active ports in the system and is a per-400-Gb and per-100-Gb capacity licenses (e.g., for the Cisco 8000 Series), per-100-Gb capacity license (e.g., for the Cisco Network Convergence System (NCS) 5500 Series, Cisco NCS 560 Series, and Cisco Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 9000 Series 3rd/4th/5th Generation Line Cards) and per-10-Gb capacity license (e.g., Cisco NCS 540 Series). On top of the Essentials software suite license, customers may also require the Advanced software suite when one or more of the Advanced software suite features are used (e.g., layer 2 Advanced services, layer 3 VPN services, and Peering). Advanced software also includes Traffic Engineering, Media Access Control Security (MACSec), Service-layer Application Programing Interface (SL-API), and Broadband Networking Gateway (BNG, supported only on the Cisco ASR 9000 Series) enablement. The “a la carte” software licenses provide specialized platform specific features (i.e., BNG on the Cisco ASR 9000 Series and Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) on the Cisco NCS 5500 Series).