While not as grandiose as IBM’s one billion dollar investment in making its Power servers more viable for cloud computing and analytics, Cisco’s $250 million push to develop a router for the Internet of Things just as ambitious – and it has already borne fruit. The vendor’s newly unveiled Network Convergence System aims to address the rise of connected devices with a centralized architecture that decouples management functions from physical infrastructure.

Cisco forecasts that there will be 18.9 billion network connections by the year 2016, an increase that is expected to boost global internet traffic to 150 petabytes per hour – the equivalent of 278 million people streaming a high-definition movie. To accommodate this growth, the NCS packs enough transport capacity to download the entire Netflix library in less than one second.

The NCS 6000, which started shipping this week, can support up to 5 Tbps per slot and 1.2 Pbps per system. The NCS 4000 can handle up to 400 Gbps per slot and 6.4 Terabits per system, while the 2000 offers “rates of 100Gbps and beyond.”

Based on Cisco’s recently released nPower x1 network processor, the NCS line converges optical and Carrier Ethernet into a programmable network fabric that simplifies provisioning and service orchestration.

Surya Panditi, the head of Cisco’s Service Provider Networking Group, explained that “the Cisco NCS was engineered with the programmability, intelligence and scalability to meet the demands of today and tomorrow. The NCS delivers an evolved programmable network that will enable service providers to generate new revenue streams and business models, while delivering exciting new experiences to their customers.”

Earlier this month, Cisco teamed up with NetApp to deliver converged solutions for cloud providers and large enterprises.