Cisco adds open network capabilities

MUMBAI, INDIA: With the growing acceptance and demands of open networks, the networking giant Cisco announced its latest offerings 'Cisco ONE' 'also called Open Network Environment, which is a multi-pronged strategy to will deliver the industry's broadest approach to programmability built on comprehensive networking portfolio and industry standards.

Cisco ONE has significant management and orchestration capabilities across its portfolio of offerings. It offers a choice of protocols, industry standards, use-case based deployment models and integration experiences while laying the foundation for a dynamic feedback loop of user, session or application analytics through policy programming.

Solutions such as Cisco's onePK, the broad API set spanning multiple layers, enables application developers to access the functionality in Cisco networking gear.

According to Shashi Kiran, Cisco's senior director - Market Management Data Center/Virtualization and Switching, the offering has unified various parts of data centres - compute, networking, and storage - that were traditionally siloed and difficult to combine.

"By enhancing open networking through tighter hardware-software coordination, customers can generate greater efficiencies from a data center infrastructure that is already being enhanced by its convergence of compute, storage and networking," Kiran said.

The network is an increasingly strategic part of every business, requiring maximum agility, flexibility, and operational simplicity. To meet these needs, organizations are turning to software defined networking (SDN) to make the network more open, programmable, and application aware without compromising resiliency, security, and maturity.

Cisco ONE is being introduced as the industry's most comprehensive approach for network programmability, and would be broader than what is currently defined as SDN (by the Open Networking Foundation). SDN leverages proprietary APIs or open standards such as OpenFlow, and Cisco ONE covers a number of them.

"Cisco's strategic road map around SDN will first look at developing a well-trained workforce to advise potential customers and retain the existing client base. Company will continue to invest and bring synergy across both hardware and software, drive consistency between physical and virtual and blur the boundaries across network and compute," Shashi commented on Cisco's vision and strategy with respect to SDN.

Early this week, Cisco acquired vCider, which offers on-demand secure cloud networking solution and is well-aligned to Cisco's ONE's strategy and solidifies its stance in this space.

"We discussed how Cisco is overhauling the network to make it into an effective business enabler. Solutions like Cisco ONE and Unified Access will make the network more open, programmable and application aware," said Mahesh Gupta, Cisco's vice president for Borderless Network at Cisco India and SAARC.

According to Gupta, the creation of an infrastructure that is scalable, intelligent and ready to support the demands and applications of today and future, while protecting customer investments is essential.

With the rapidly changing demands of organizations across verticals it is imperative for the network to be conducive to these requirements and adapt accordingly. An intelligent network is therefore a key element which enables the transformation of the network, added Gupta.

Cisco claimed to have 70-85 per cent of the networking market (routing and switching) today, making it largest focus group in the industry. Company's latest offering will be available in the market around early next year.