Global networking heavyweight Cisco has finally exhibited what the organization hopes to be its super answer to SDN or software driven networking, built from its super-secret startup Insieme Networks.
The origin of Cisco’s threat from SDN is quite fundamental and its soul lies in the way large and small enterprise are embracing infrastructure solutions that better contribute to their core values. This is not a confluence but a conflict between software and traditional hardware.
Cisco being a traditionally hardware driven organization has rallied heavily behind its routers and switches lines, however, driven by a number of advantages such as better manageability, slowly but steadily enterprise is moving towards software driven controls of their networking infrastructure. This has surely kept a traditional company like Cisco worrying on the networking trenches. Meanwhile, Cisco’s quest to answer strengthening threat from SDN comes in the form of Insieme.
As networking experts firmly emphasize, in an SDN driven networking world, enterprise of various size and nature would continue to buy routers and switches, however the relevance of such hardware would continue to fall behind and eventually it is a software arena and hardware such as routers or switches would not hold much of importance. And hence, it can be bought from almost anywhere and that too in much lesser numbers.
The Essence of SDN
Driven by software capabilities, SDN allows network administrators to manage network services much more easily and cheaply as well. This is usually done with the help of decoupling the network system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent from the underlying systems that forwards traffic to the selected destination.
This process if simplifying networking and giving it s new software driven direction where hardware is bound to lose its old world charm and charisma.
Cisco has also said that its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) will give system administrators a single platform for configuring switches to connect up virtualized networking systems. However, the future success of Cisco’s SDN game will depend on the way enterprise receives it and much more importantly how it evolves to deliver value to its customers. Additionally, it has to be accepted well by the overall networking ecosystem including players such as VMWare, Microsoft or EMC.
