IT Manager, Ops, and network administrators suffer today from the complex approaches being followed towards network operations which gives no space for innovation. Additionally, the current box-by-box approaches for configuration and provision can be cumbersome and lack agility to turn up new services quickly to meet demands and Service-Level Agreements (SLA) of internal customers. Adopting a new approach towards network automation is key to addressing these challenges, by automating network operation not only do we reduce operational and management expenses but we also provide investment protection as we adopt the application economy (a software approach that grows much faster).
SDN startled a revolution in the networking community, making network management, control and configuration a lot easier with the use of software-based tools. Briefly, SDN is about network programmability and automation. However, the old version of SDN (using OpenFlow) completely decoupled the control and data-plane, leaving the controller out alone to handle all the complex control logic, this solution was considered fine in small network environments but it would not scale in large network environments. Therefore, there are a lot of efforts towards making SDN more scalable and efficient, thus leading to simple, automated network ecosystem that can scale. Cisco presents the Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) architecture as one of the leading efforts for taking SDN to the next level. What is Cisco ACI? Cisco’s ACI is an innovative, pretentiously secure architecture that allows for centralized, application-driven policy automation and management. Cisco’s ACI provides increased visibility in physical and virtual Networks. Furthermore, it gives IT leaders the ability to manage complex private, public and hybrid environments, it can also lower operational overhead and deliver higher service levels. The main building blocks of Cisco’s ACI architecture are:
Although there are not yet many deployments of ACI, Cisco promises that by 2015 ACI will be receive a much higher adoption rate. Well, for me I do see competition so Cisco needs to work very hard. In my future posts, I will be explaining other variants of SDN 2.0 that will be facing off Cisco’s ACI in 2015.