Cisco's Answer to SDN: Open Network Environment
Posted by
Mike Fratto
June 13, 2012
One Platform Kit (OnePK) is a set of SDKs and APIs that will be rolled out to Cisco's ISR G2, ASR, CSR and Nexus product lines in a phased approach staring in the fourth quarter, with the ISR G2 and ASR 1000 products. How much of OnePK will be available as C or Java SDKs, and how much will be available as APIs, remains to be seen and will likely depend on the target audience. For example, applications written for IOS, IOS-XE and IOS-XR will likely be SDK-based, while those that run on separate systems and integrate with Cisco's products could be API-based. At least one Cisco partner, Ctera, has already integrated its cloud storage product with the ISR as a Cloud Connector, which was already announced at CiscoLive.
Cisco is also enhancing its Nexus 1000v virtual switch, adding support for Citrix Xen and Red Hat's KVM. Cisco initially launched the Nexus 1000v on VMware ESX, and in September added Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor in Windows 8. Cisco is also offering APIs to the Nexus 1000v for integration with other systems and also support for OpenStack's Quantum networking module. The broader hypervisor support, along with OpenStack integration and APIs, opens the Nexus 1000v to a wider customer base and makes it an attractive choice for cloud providers.
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Cisco is also adding service chaining to the Nexus 1000v vPath so flows can be intelligently passed through modules like the ASA 1000v, the virtual security gateway and virtual wide area application services. VPath lets cloud providers or enterprise administrators define application policies that can be applied to tenants or applications.
Finally, Cisco is implementing VXLAN overlays within the Nexus 1000v, which encapsulates VM-to-VM traffic into a tunnel. VXLAN encapsulation simplifies interconnecting VMs on the same virtual network, regardless of the topology of the underlying physical network. VXLAN is an experimental IETF RFC that has yet to move into a standards track document. Cisco is bridging VXLAN overlay network to a physical network with a VXLAN gateway so the two networks can be easily integrated. For example, traffic coming from outside the data center destined for a VM within a VXLAN must, at some point, be bridged to the overlay network. A VXLAN gateway is an easy way to do bridge the virtual and physical realm.
Of course, no discussion of SDN and data center networking is complete without OpenFlow. Cisco will be offering, also in the fourth quarter, a proof-of-concept OpenFlow agent for the Catalyst 3560-X and 3750-X access switches, as well as an OpenFlow proof-of-concept controller. The proof-of-concept OpenFlow features are intended to let customers experiment with OpenFlow without committing to a new protocol. Cisco has been resistant to support OpenFlow--that's unlike competitors HP, which also has OpenFlow support on its campus switch line, and Brocade, which sees OpenFlow as a service provider, cloud provider and carrier play.
Mike Fratto is editor of Network Computing. You can email him, follow him on Twitter, or join the Network Computing group on LinkedIN. He's not as grumpy as he seems.
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