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With more than 100 deployments of its big CRS-1 router in the last year and 650 reconfigurable add/drop multiplexing blades out in the market, Cisco Systems is feeling the momentum for its hardware. However, today the company touted its softer side with the introduction of the Cisco Distributed Denial of Service Protection solution.

The DDoS solution is applicable both at the service layer, where service providers can offer it as a managed service, and at the operations layers to shield their own network infrastructure from DDoS attacks. Sprint has already begun offering the capability through its Sprint IP Defender service.

"We think the sweet spot for [service providers] is the commercial space as companies look for ways to out-task security to a third party, which is much more cost effective than having a contractor come out once a month and scrub for 30 hours," said Jeff Spagnola, vice president of service provider marketing at Cisco.

The Cisco DDoS protection solution consists of several major functional elements, including detection, mitigation and traffic diversion and injection. Its mitigation function distinguishes legitimate traffic from malicious traffic, filters the malicious traffic and allows legitimate traffic to pass.

In addition to allowing service providers to protect their own networks or offer managed DDoS protection, the solution can provide peering edge DDoS protection so service providers can offer clean wholesale connections to their Internet service provider customers.

The Cisco DDoS protection solution portfolio incorporates new Cisco service modules and interoperable, partner-developed products, including: the Cisco Traffic Anomaly Detector XT appliance, the new Cisco Traffic Anomaly Detector Service Module for the Cisco 7600 Series Router and Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch. It also includes the Cisco Guard XT 5650 appliance and the new Cisco Anomaly Guard Service Module for the Cisco 7600 Series Router and Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch as well as Arbor Networks' Peakflow SP option for intelligent traffic and routing analysis.

"It's beautiful to build these great networks with big pipes and capacity, but how do service providers make a profit out of that? We think we have laid out a strong portfolio of products that service providers can use to deploy security in a scalable manner to the marketplace," Spagnola said.

On the momentum side, Cisco announced that deployments of the ROADM solution have now reached 650 across 45 different customers. Cisco introduced the ROADM last October.

The ROADM solution, which helps customers provision any wavelength at any time and anywhere in the network, is available on the Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform. It brings SONET-like manageability to metro DWDM. It also allows service providers and cable multiservice operators to include Gigabit Ethernet and 10-Gigabit Ethernet anywhere in their networks.

"It's moving pretty well in the long-haul market and now we are seeing opportunity in the metro market and look forward to taking a bigger chunk of that," Spagnola said.

Cisco is expecting to announce another major carrier deployment of its CRS-1 product this week.