By looking at the sheer amount of Breakouts and technical sessions here at Cisco Live London, it isn’t hard to understand why networks are becoming more and more complex.  Networks are converging onto single infrastructures, more and more business processes are becoming more network centric and this translates into more functionality and more dependencies between functions and network layers, and thus more complexity.  It becomes very hard for a single human being to understand these dependencies and layer interactions in order to do per-box configuration.  Typically this problem is attempted to be ‘solved’ by moving some of these dependencies and layer interactions into a central place, but that just moves the problem.  Wouldn’t it be cool to allow networks to become self-aware, such that they can learn from their neighboring nodes ? Read More »

Tags: Autonomic, Cisco ONE, Cisco onePK, Complexity

This blog is live from the floor of Cisco Live in London. The highlight for me this year in London has been the introduction, with our partners Ping Identity, of the Identity Cloud Connector, built on onePK, as part of the Cisco Cloud Connectors family of solutions. I’ll go into that in more detail below, but first some other highlights.

Yesterday we delivered a full day workshop on network automation, including EEM and introductions to onePK. Bruno Klauser, Joe Clarke, Jason Pfeifer, with me in a supporting role, helped  29 attendees through a series of exercises to help them get the most out of the extensive automation features on our platforms. The attendees must have liked it, as the score was 4.61/5. Well done guys!

The buzz here in the World of Solutions (WoS) is great. We have onePK demonstrations in the Data Centre and Borderless Network architecture zones, and we have been talking to customers and partners non-stop, all day. The Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy has really gripped people’s imagination, and it has been very exciting, and fun, to engage in some serious conversations about what ONE can do for our customers’ businesses. Read More »

Tags: Cisco Borderless Networks, cisco live, Cisco ONE, Cisco onePK, Cloud Connectors, data center, Identity and Cloud Security, network automation, onePK, Open Network Environment

I am sitting and reflecting here at the start of Cisco Live London. As I walk the halls, I continue to be amazed by the size, depth, and breadth of this event. Networking continues to grow, and thousands of people are eager to come together to see the latest. Read More »

Tags: #CLEUR, cisco live, Cisco Live London, cisco live london 2013, EIGRP, human connections, human network, identity, Identity Connector, mobility, ONE, onePK, SDN

This post expands on my previous posts about what makes onePK better, and the onePK software architecture. Here I focus on the application deployment options onePK makes available.

The deployment options are summarized in the diagram below.

Process hosting means that the onePK application is running within a container on the same hardware as the network operating system (NOS). Read More »

Tags: API, blade hosting, Cisco Cloud Connector, Cisco ONE, Cisco onePK, Cisco Open Network Environment, deployment, end-point hosting, Network Containers, network operating systems, nexus, NOS, onePK, Proces hosting, routing, switching

This blog is a follow on to my introductions to onePK and the onePK software architecture. This post is special, as I have the pleasure of introducing, by way of conversation, my colleague Shelly Cadora, an experienced speaker on SDN, and developer with onePK, and to highlight some of the work she has done with onePK.

Nathan:

“So, Shelly, in my blog on onePK a few months ago I said that I thought that we would start to see new models for network management and deployment enabled by onePK. Lo and behold! You created just such an example for demonstration at Cisco Live, so what’s that mean for us all?” Read More »

Tags: API, application networking services, cisco live, Cisco onePK, network management, onePK, process hosting, programmable networks, SDN, simplify deployment, software