Cisco Goes on Offense With SDN

wzt10gtek

SAN FRANCISCO -- More pieces of Cisco Systems Inc.'s software-defined networking (SDN) strategy will emerge within a few weeks, as the company prepares to unveil its program of application programming interfaces (APIs) that will reach into the network..

And those APIs will be part of an IT-unifying strategy that will take years to unfold, Cisco executives Rob Lloyd and Pankaj Patel told reporters during a small discussion session held Wednesday via telepresence to sites in Massachusetts, Toronto and California's Bay Area.

Naturally, SDN was a major topic -- not only because it's what all the cool kids talk about, but because Cisco is explicitly becoming more of a software and services company. The plan is to double Cisco's software revenues, to $12 billion a year, in the next five years. "I really view SDN as a major opportunity for Cisco. It's a real opportunity to leverage the installed base that we have," said Patel, the executive vice president who's also Cisco's chief development officer.

Cisco's SDN story starts with the APIs that customers and developers will use. The idea was introduced in June, along with the name onePK for the platform kit consisting of those APIs.

"We are in alpha, and you will see a roadmap of the program interfaces announced within the next month," said Rob Lloyd, a Cisco prersidrent in charge of development and sales.

Cisco hopes to publicly discuss onePK use cases in the second half of the year, the executives added.

Beyond SDN, OnePK is the first step toward a unified IT platform meant to merge and simplify disparate aspects of data centers and enterprise networks. That platform will take five years to flesh out, and Cisco is pledging it will be an open platform developed, eventually, with the help of partners of all stripes (including channel partners).

The onePK APIs will supposedly make it relatively simple for customers to program the network. Behind the scenes, Cisco is trying to make onePK simple for itself as well. The three major operating system camps -- IOS, IOS-XR and NX-OS -- have been pooled into one group at Cisco.

Platform and protocols development will be done for all three operating systems at once, rather than in three separate efforts. "So, BGP [the Border Gateway Protocol that handles routing] for all the OSs will be one type," Patel said.

Building an SDN controllerThe executives didn't mention Insieme Networks Inc. -- the spin-in rumored to be building Cisco's SDN controller and/or its next-generation switch -- but they did say Cisco is building a controller.

"It will have some of the network services aspect, and it will have a network management aspect," Patel said.

The controller is being designed with the assumption that some major changes will get suggested after the first release -- which would be normal, but here, it seems a concession to the vague and shifting nature of SDN.

"We have a framework of what we believe we want to put in, and we have been getting feedback from a lot of the schools in particular," Patel said.

The controller also "needs to be tied to powerful ASICs that can deliver scale," Lloyd said. That fits with Cisco's overall philosophy, where ASICs still rule the high-end and most sophisticated systems, and also matches the Insieme team's reputation for being strong on ASIC development with prior spin-ins. Another topic that came up was the way that virtualization is bringing Cisco's world closer to VMware Inc.'s. For now the companies are allies, because they provide separate parts of the infrastructure.

"We think that the world of customers that we talk to will absolutely want to connect their virtual environments [mostly VMware] to their physical environments [Cisco]," Lloyd said.

Overlap between the two is going to get dicier; Cisco's Nexus 1000v gives it a virtualization play, and VMware became a noteworthy SDN player when it acquired Nicira. But Lloyd wasn't willing to predict all-out war between the two.

Rather, customers want things in the data center to work together and to be simplified, and that's going to force Cisco and VMware to stay friendly. "This is my job. I'm Canadian; we're very peaceful," Lloyd said.

When it comes to storage, another key let of the data-center market, Cisco definitely wants to stay out of the market. "Our rule is: Can we make it to No. 1 or No. 2? Is there an inflection point?" Lloyd said. "We are adamant we are gonna partner in storage."



10GTEK is a world's Top-10 DAC twinax Cables maker. Our product line rangs from DAC cables SFP+, 40G QSFP+, XFP, MiniSAS 8088, CX4 8470 cables, etc to optical transceiver modules 40G QSFP+ SR4/LR4, SFP, SFP+, XFP, XENPAK, GBIC, X2, etc. For many products, only 10Gtek hold the stock and could ship factory direct. All products passed CE, FCC, RoHs, etc. Now enjoy the promotional discount - up to 90% off, free shipping for 48 Counries on order over $300.