Cisco’ core proposition is to let customers get excited about the intelligence that’s already in the OpenFlow and SDN network and letting users program it. Unlike dealing with BGP and VLAN setups, once you want a connection between two points, and describe your SLA, the underlying network will do the rest.
Enable Cloud Providers and Enterprises to Deploy Differentiated Cloud Services:
Cisco Applications
Unified Data Center
Cloud Intelligent Network
Lead in Selected XaaS Categories, where Cisco has Differentiated Application IP:
Cisco WebEx Collaboration Suite
Cisco Cloud Security for Web and Email filtering
Cloud-based management for “Lean IT” solution
Cisco And Open Protocols
Cisco also announced supports for OpenStack and OpenFlow. For OpenStack, which describers how to get services, networking, and storage systems working together in a private cloud environment. The CloudStack is getting more traction in the markets vs. OpenStack. Mr. Tucker stated that he is seeing significant deployments in CloudStack and Cisco is very supportive of it being able to run on UCS. Cisco is contributing a lot of their resources to that technology, particular around an area of focus on extending the model of cloud computing to bring our networking as a service, defining those APIs, collectively contributing code so it can become a part of OpenStack.
What SDN Promises
One of the tenants of SDN is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for every single networking device to have all the smarts necessary for it to do its job. In fact, because of autonomous nature of switches, they can end up making forwarding decisions that might sense to it, but are simply bad choices further down the road. A reasonable analogy is driving to work. You go the same way every day, but if three lanes of a four-lane road are closed one day, it would have made more sense for you to go a different route. If there was a central controller helping you-think of your navigation system, or Google Maps on steroids – you’d end up talking a better route that avoided the problem. The central controller has turned out to be a better way to manage wireless networks, where congestion or spectral noise can frequently cause localized problems.
The Cloud Opportunity for Cisco
When queried how much of the cloud opportunity for Cisco would fall under services and how much under product revenue, Mr. Tucker opined that services will likely emerge as the as the primary component of Cisco’s cloud computing strategy. As new technology comes into the market, particularly around cloud computing, there is an opportunity to help customers move from a kind of visualized environment into Cisco’s cloud platform environment.
Published by FiberStore – Industry News – www.fs.com
