http://gigaom.com/2013/11/06/cisco-sdn-news-new-switches-now-a-controller-later-and-insieme-comes-home/
Cisco CEO John Chambers traveled to Wall Street for Wednesday morning's launch of new products key to its SDN story and, oh by the way to announce that Cisco is bringing Insieme, the spin-in dedicated to SDN, back in house.
That tidbit was buried 4 pages into the press release announcing a new Series 9000 switching family and the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller designed to bring SDN goodness to them.
First the deliverables: The new Nexus 9508 switch is available now; smaller 9300 switches will come a bit later; and the APIC controller and the full NX-OS operating system to support is due in April 2014.
In case you, have not been following this story line, Cisco is a giant in the networking routers and switches that run the world's data centers. It's revenue stream has largely depended on the sale of this high-margin hardware every couple of years to customers needing new features and functions.
My favorite quote comes from an unnamed source who told Business Insider that when Chambers asked what an embrace of SDN would mean to the company was told it would turn Cisco's "$43 billion business into a $22 billion business." You see the problem.
The siren call of SDN
The allure of SDN — as pitched by Nicira, now part of VMware, Big Switch, and other newer companies — is that hardware devices can be reconfigured and updated via software, which means users can get updates and improvements without buying as much hardware. And, in theory, the hardwre they use can be lower-end commodity stuff.
Clearly that's a threat to networking hardware companies, not only Cisco but Juniper Networks and others which have all scrambled to come up with SDN game plans.
So when news leaked that Cisco was going to (probably) finally disclose its Insieme game plan last week, a flurry of SDN related press releases erupted: Last week, hot startup Cumulus launched a new release of its Linux-based operating system for commodity switches; Arista Networks unveiled new software for its switches and Big Switch announced a new CEO.
Slow-mo SDN rollouts
Analysts said the latest Insieme news is the latest in a trickle of news. Gartner analyst Andrew Lerner said ACI provides network flexibility via "template-based provisioning and infrastructure automation, delivered via a controller plus software that is baked into the switching hardware. "
That controller works with any virtualization software — a fact that Cisco stressed to me — and supports both physical and virtual devices in the same way, but requires new Cisco switching hardware, Lerner added.]
Rival solutions like VMware's NSX don't care about the underlying network hardware but overlay it with software.
So, basically Cisco says you need its new hardware to run its SDN — somethign that does not bother ZK Research analyst Zeus Kerravala. "There's nothing wrong with that. It's impossible to make the case where off-the-shelf commodity hardware will come close to the performance benefits of optimized hardware," he said.
Current Analysis analyst Mike Fratto said Cisco may face push back though because many customers will not want to upgrade all their Cisco hardware to get SDN benefits and there are backward compatibility issues getween the new gear and older Cisco hardware.
As of now, Fratto noted what Cisco has delivered is just some new switches and that's not a headline. "When they come out APIC in the second quarter of 2014 is where it gets interesting. "
In other words, the slow-mo SDN rollout continues.
Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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- The promise of software-defined networking
- Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
- Forecast: sizing the software-defined networking market
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