Avi Networks and Cisco Join Forces by Entering Into a Strategic Reseller Agreement

Avi Networks & Cisco join forces by entering into a strategic reseller agreement

We have been working very closely with Avi Networks for more than a year now to help our joint customers achieve their goals. This partnership spans engineering, product management, and sales. Because of the successes we have experienced over the past year, we have jointly decided to take our partnership to the next level by entering into a strategic reseller agreement. “Enterprises modernizing their data centers are looking for elastic, virtual network functions for their applications,” said Sharad Rastogi, vice president of product management for Enterprise Networking at Cisco. “The combination of Avi Networks’ software-defined load balancing architecture and the Cisco CSP 2100 NFV platform delivers flexible, cost-effective, and turn-key load balancing services.”

Strategic Reseller Agreement

Today we are publicly announcing for the first time this reseller agreement as we kick off Cisco Live US. If you happen to be attending Cisco Live this week, you can visit Avi Networks at booth #2637. The Avi Network’s software load balancing solution called the Avi Vantage Platform will be added to Cisco’s Global Price List (GPL). The Avi software license SKUs are available as annual or three-year subscriptions from Cisco. These new SKUs will be available a la carte and also together with Cisco’s CSP 2100. While the Cisco CSP 2100 and Avi Networks solution bundles address most use cases, there are some use cases for Avi in public clouds and container environments where the Avi a la carte SKUs make sense for our joint customers. Providing choice allows both Cisco’s and Avi’s partners and sales teams to offer the best solution to our customers. We wanted to ensure that Cisco had the ability to sell everything in the Avi portfolio.

Avi Networks

Avi Networks provides an elastic software load balancing solution that truly fulfills the promise of NFV. With its software-defined architecture separating the control plane (Avi Controller) and data planes (Avi Service Engine or distributed load balancers), the Avi Vantage Platform provides the capabilities of an enterprise-class application delivery controller (ADC) in an elastic, software-only solution. It goes beyond load balancing to deliver precise application analytics, security, application visibility, and predictive auto-scaling. The platform provides central management of a distributed load balancing fabric that can be deployed in a multi-tenant configuration or on a per-app basis. “More than ever before, enterprises are demanding elastic application delivery solutions to address business and customer needs. Companies are overpaying for overprovisioned load balancers and underperforming networking tools,” said Edward Sharp, chief strategy officer and vice-president of business development at Avi Networks. “With the Cisco partnership and the CSP 2100 platform, Avi Networks delivers ready-to-use and cost-effective application networking services to enterprises.”

Avi Networks High Level Architecture

Avi Networks maintains CSP 2100 platforms in their engineering labs today for ongoing validation and they have also been officially certified by Cisco through our Open NFV Ecosystem program.

Cisco Cloud Services Platform (CSP) 2100 and SAE

The CSP 2100 high-performance NFV platform is a foundational component of the Cisco’s Secure Agile Exchange (SAE) solution. SAE securely connects employees, customers, and partners to applications across private data centers, public IaaS clouds and/or public SaaS clouds. Over the last year Cisco and Avi Networks have partnered to deliver turn-key software load balancing services on the CSP 2100 for SAE as well as for basic load balancing use cases. Global Financial and Global Energy companies have already taken advantage of the joint solution to deliver elastic and cost-effective load balancing as a virtual network function (VNF) on the CSP 2100 platform. These enterprises have used the solution to gain flexibility and automation replacing legacy purpose-built hardware load balancers. Avi is only one of several VNFs running on the CSP 2100 at these customers.

With the CSP 2100 NFV platform, Cisco has created the ideal platform to deliver flexible VNFs. The CSP 2100 is a high-performance x86 software and hardware platform that is designed to host and manage any KVM-based network virtual service. It provides lifecycle management by offering its users the ability create, modify, upgrade, and shutdown Virtual Machines (VMs) at a moment’s notice through an easy-to-use GUI, CLI, and/or RESTful API / NetConf interfaces.

CSP 2100 NFV Platform High Level Architecture

Learn more about the joint solution by visiting the Avi Networks booth #2637 at Cisco Live this week or sign-up for LTRCLD-2121. This is an instructor-led lab that takes place on Tuesday, at 1 pm PST for Secure Agile Exchange that incorporates Avi Networks.

Avi + CSP 2100