Will Cisco’s Application-Centric Infrastructure Win In SDN?

ACI Highlights

• Has a dominant position in enterprise networks, is growing in the server market
• Is dependent on up-stream partnerships for storage, virtualisation and applications
• Launches ACI – differentiated by being an application-driven SDN approach
• Proposes DevOps teams to improve application lifecycle management
• Designed for Service Providers and Enterprises
• The ecosystem includes VCE, EMC, NetApp and even VMware
• Some users are selecting Cloud or workload-optimised systems avoiding yet another architectural debate

I spent a great couple of days at Cisco’s C-Scape analyst meeting last week and managed to catch up with them on ACI. I think this is really important for the development of data centre computing. Let’s see if you agree.

Lots Of Network, Growing Servers, Little Storage, Some Software

Cisco entered the server market by launching UCS in April 2008 and has done well to build its market share: we place it in 7^th position overall (with a 2.0% market share) and 4^th in the x86 market (2.8%). It claims to have 28k customers for UCS and to be present in 75% of all Fortune 500 companies. Unlike virtually all other server competitors it has avoided being a storage system supplier itself, preferring up-stream partnering with EMC (both in VCE and with VPLEX), NetApp (FlexPod and ExpressPod) and HDS (Unified Compute Platform). It put the cat amongst the pigeons by buying Whiptail last year to become a flash storage supplier, but Cisco claims to have no intention of entering the broader storage market.
It more than makes up for its lack of storage by being dominant in enterprise networking: it had a 48.3% share of enterprise/consumer networks in the year to the end of September – its lead is significant as the next 3 vendors (HP, Huawei and Alcatel Lucent) each have just a 4.0% share. Its switches, routers and other products are present in almost all large and medium sized enterprises, giving it a vital role in the development of data centre computing and CIandIS.
We show the revenues of Cisco and its upstream partners in the Figure, which underlines the advantages each brings in its data centre offerings.

Application-Centric Infrastructure – Differentiated SDN

To compete with Cisco many suppliers have adopted Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) strategies – most notably VMware since its acquisition of Nicira. As almost all UCS – and most CIandIS – deployments also include VMware software, the NSX combination of VMware’s knowledge of security and application and Nicira’s in networking threatens Cisco’s natural role as the network supplier. It’s hardly surprising therefore that they have fallen out, or that Cisco has launched its own ACI infrastructure as an alternative to NSX and other approaches.
Cisco’s ACI is an application-driven policy model providing real-time application health monitoring and supporting its Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy for ‘open’ APIs, source and standards. It includes north- and south-bound APIs for Layer 4-7 services, virtual network infrastructure, monitoring, management and orchestration. Specific components include:

• Nexus 9000 switches – users can purchase a software upgrade to migrate to the full ACI fabric mode
• Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) – automating network provisioning and control based on the user’s application requirements and policies, providing centralised policy management rather than a centralised network control plane as per the ‘classical’ (ONF.org) SDN model
• Application Virtual Switch (AVS) – a virtual switch implementing ACI policies at the virtual networking layer; separately, Nexus 1000V has been integrated with ACI’s APIC
• ACI Security – allowing firewalls to be treated as a pool of resources via policy-based traffic redirection; ACI has a hierarchical policy model based on the concept on ‘End Point Groups’ (groups of physical and/or virtual machines)
• An Integrated physical and virtual infrastructure
• Open ecosystem for network, storage, management and orchestration suppliers – including BMC, CA, Citrix, EMC, Embrane, Emulex, F5, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, Panduit, Puppet Labs, NIKSUN, OpsCode, Red Hat, SAP, Splunk, Symantec, VCE and (significantly) VMware itself

ACI creates a scalable fabric in which all devices are connected via a ‘spine and leaf’ ‘CLOS’ architecture (created by Christopher Clos in 1953) and also offers maximum 40Gbps network speed.
Cisco is offering its customers the ability to migrate to ACI from their current investments, avoiding what would be significant ‘rip and replacement’ costs. While ACI includes advanced virtualisation and Cisco’s own ideas on SDN, it is also heavily dependent the code in the ASICs of its switches – it claims to be taking a ‘Merchant+’ silicon strategy.
Central to its approach is the suggestion that the users should combine their operations, software development and QA functions in one DevOps team to accelerate application development, deployment and lifecycle management with ACI.

Some Conclusions – ACI Helps Cisco Balance SDN Against Its Traditional Strengths

This application-centric approach will help Cisco compete more strongly with other system vendors most of whom have their own applications and decades more experience in working with enterprise ISVs.
Cisco is the dominant enterprise network supplier and has a massively successful ASIC-based hardware business. Having worked with its switches and routers for many years, other vendors are now using SDN, SDDC, OpenFlow and other technologies to compete against it, including VMware with which it partners so successfully in data centre and CIandIS solutions. Announcing ACI is good for its customers – showing that Cisco can also play in the SDN world, albeit in an idiosyncratic way and understandably stressing the importance of its historical approach. By embracing applications it is going beyond the usual infrastructure and architectural discussions of its rivals. It is actively working with ISVs to help define ‘best practice’ blueprints for its ‘Application Network Profiles’, which help customers get the best performance from their applications.
It doesn’t want to fall out too much with VMware over SDN any more than it does with NetApp and EMC over storage with its Whiptail acquisition; however these conflicts are a natural consequence of its decision to use partnerships with other system vendors rather than to build out its own capabilities through acquisition.
ACI is a valuable addition to the development of the data center of the future, but many users looking for specific workload-optimised solutions today don’t need yet another discussion around architectures – just automated systems and some reduction in admin and licensing costs, or those moving to the Cloud to avoid the architectural debate altogether. However ACI is interesting to a great many others in both Service Provider and enterprises and significant in demonstrating Cisco’s participation – even if idiosyncratic – in the developing SDN and virtualisation debates, where there is much to win and lose.