At CiscoLive 2017 in Las Vegas, the ENCS platform gained a new four core box. The ENCS5104 is now appearing on the Cisco website in the form of an updated ENCS platform datasheet. The datasheet shows that the platform is a much lower entry point than the previous ENCS54xx series devices.
Powered by an AMD chipset, the ENCS5104 uses the RX-421ND. This chip uses previous generation Excavator cores, rather than the new Zen core. Coupled with up to 32GB of RAM (half of the ENCS5400 maximum) and with the same options regarding flash drive; it should still provide enough power to run most local NFV requirements. It doesn’t have the hot-swap hard disks, reducing cost there. And it only has two extra Gigabit Ethernet ports to use, rather than the 8 Gigabit Ethernet switch ports on the ENCS5400. Like the ENCS5406, these ports don’t have Power over Ethernet (PoE). (It’s only the two top-end models, the ENCS5408 and ENCS5412 that have the PoE option.) It is also missing the onboard management platform, so diagnosis needs to be carried out on-site using a serial console.
But the main thing that is missing is the Cisco NIM slot, meaning that it supports environments where there Ethernet terminated WAN connections only. (But this is less likely to be an issue in future). Although it is on the datasheet, and possibly orderable, it might be a while before actually appears in the wild.
