Cisco Helping Advance Open Source in Networking

Last week I was in Italia at the Cisco Live! Milano event where I also had the opportunity to speak about OpenDaylight (ODL) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). What stood out for me the most during my time there was the tremendous progress being made on technologies that are really disrupting the networking space

SDN and NFV have been advancing innovation in the networking industry over the past few years, but it’s still early, and not many of the technologies have made it out of the lab and into the networks – until now.

I joined developers in the Cisco DevNet Zone to get  a look at the company’s SDN and NFV software and what I saw was a portfolio of applications, mostly based on OpenDaylight, that are advancing the transition to networks managed by software. By far, the high point was the CloudVPN, which is offering open APIs to allow developers to create their own apps, portals, and automation on top of the platform.   

Among other things I saw a WAN Automation engine that can be used in Service Provider WAN networks (using OpenDaylight) which provides deployment and optimization functionalities. Combined with CIRBA, it enables an orchestration platform for intelligent workload placement.  Cool stuff.

I saw applications that create the  ability to schedule bandwidth allocations across the network can be a powerful way for Service Providers and Enterprises to create value from their network. The bandwidth on demand application, built on OpenDaylight (and with OSS/BSS integration), provides a simple way to calendar and provision bandwidth on demand.

There were policy applications which are OpenDaylight-based apps that implement identify-driven security. I was given a demo that showed how to design and deploy  group-based network segmentation, Quality of Service (QoS), and intelligent path selection, making the network adaptive to new devices, sensors, identity, applications and regulatory rules.

There were apps that enable the network to publish access circuit data to a simple SDN application.   Tools that provide automated visibility and network path control which allows you to manage and program MPLS TE/SR paths, which will help monitor application performance.  And a bunch of others including BGP routing analytics tools, Yang modeling tools and more.

There was even an Oculus rift based immersive visualization tool which made me a bit nauseous.

While it’s well known that Cisco, a founding Platinum member of OpenDaylight, has been supporting open and collaborative SDN and NFV development, some still question its commitment to the industry’s transition to software. What I saw tells me their contributions to the future open networking are very real.

In the open source community, we know well the benefits of open and collaborative platform and application development.  As the network industry is figuring out how to make the turn toward scalable SDN/NFV deployments, it is nice to see Cisco ’s contributions to the community and the response from developers.    

Check out DevNet here:https://developer.cisco.com/site/devnet/home/index.gsp