Cisco Cisco Broadband Access Center for Cable 4.1 Data Sheet

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Data Sheet

Cisco BAC Overview

Cisco announces Cisco

Broadband Access Center (BAC) 4.2. Cisco BAC provides a centralized and automated

subscriber device management system for service providers to control and configure home gateways and the IP

devices behind the gateways.

The Cisco BAC platform is highly scalable and reliable, with industry-leading performance. It supports multiple

technologies and devices including DOCSIS

and PacketCable

™

, as well as providing the extensibility to support

customer proprietary devices. With this new release BAC now fully supports Linux on Cisco Unified Computing

System

™

(Cisco UCS

™

), significantly lowering startup and administrative costs.

Benefits

Cisco BAC offers the following key benefits:

●

Reliability: Cisco BAC provides high reliability and high availability, supporting autonomous headends,

multiple distributed device provisioning engines (DPEs), each of which includes its own data-caching

repository, a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server, and a time-of-day (ToD) server. During central

server outages or communication problems, Cisco BAC provides continued service to existing registered

subscribers.

●

Scalability and performance: Cisco BAC can support up to 60 million devices in distributed deployments.

Cisco BAC uses multiple distributed device management and caching engines to balance processing of

device requests. A single DPE can support as many as 2 million devices. These DPEs can be combined in

groups to provide redundancy, load sharing, and disaster recovery. The regional distribution unit (RDU) is a

central component used to manage service requests and modifications. A single RDU server in conjunction

with the appropriate number of DPE groups can support as many as 60 million devices with a sustained rate

of hundreds of thousands of new devices a day.

●

Integration with current systems: Cisco BAC integrates with existing service provider systems, such as

billing systems, operations support systems (OSSs), and other customer management systems, through a

Java provisioning API.

●

Extendable technology support: Cisco BAC supports DOCSIS cable modems and set-top boxes for high-

speed data provisioning, PacketCable voice provisioning of media termination adapters (MTAs) and

DOCSIS cable modems. It also can be extended to support other Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol

(DHCP)-based devices, including non-DOCSIS cable modems.