Myth-busting: Is Cisco’s Approach to SDN Open?

In our continuing myth-busting series, Cisco SDN expert Frank D’Agostino and I are debunking trendy technology myths around SDN.

The more I speak to customers these days, the more I hear them talk about open. Customers want an infrastructure that is programmable and based on open standards. They want rapid feature integration and network automation. And they’re looking to take advantage of third-party tools and existing assets, and integrate them efficiently and cost-effectively into a modern network.

To address these needs, Cisco has modernized our operating system NX-OS through programmability, provided open northbound and southbound APIs for ACI, and established an open Partner Ecosystem—which even includes some of our competitors—for the integration of third-party tools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpeNoyYBVc4&list=PLFT-9JpKjRTAB1jxPP0GT_PEdI6Hu32TQ&index=3

But that’s not all. Cisco has a history of contributing technology innovations to open and standards initiatives, and things are no different with SDN. In the past year, for example, we’ve opened up and published our ACI interfaces and have contributed ACI’s Group Based Policy model to OpenDayLight and OpenStack.  We’ve also published the OpFlex standard to the IETF and worked with the open source community to provide a reference implementation of the OpFlex agent, which is leveraged by the OpenStack and Linux communities. In addition, we’ve created an open model to enhance SDN network agility and make it easier for customers to manage virtual machines using BGP-EVPN (which stand for Border Gateway Protocol and Ethernet Virtual Private Network respectively) with VXLAN. Our goal is to provide openness and scale in a multi-vendor environment.

Bottom line: Cisco embraces an open approach through open APIs, open standards, open source contributions. Customers benefit because they can integrate with their existing tools and appliances, and that really represents true investment protection.

We look forward to reading your comments and feedback.