Cisco is unveiling a new beefed up line of virtual services appliances this week called the Nexus 1100 series, the next generation of our Nexus 1010 appliances. These virtual service appliances are integral to the deployment of scalable virtual security and management nodes in the data center, for offloading application servers from running virtual service modules, and for empowering the networking team to retain control of network and security policies in a platform that they manage.
Cisco customers deploying Nexus 1000V virtual switches as the foundation for their virtual networks and virtual overlays typically deploy the Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM), the virtual switch’s management plane, in the Nexus 1100, along with some combination of Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) firewalls, virtual Prime Network Analysis Modules (NAM), Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) for both LAN and SAN networks, and soon, even the Imperva SecureSphere Web Application Firewall (WAF). The Nexus 1100 is a UCS-based appliance for hosting the service VM’s, but it runs the NX-OS operating system, so it can be managed like a network device and retains policy controls for the networking team. Read More »
The communications industry has come a long way from fixed, inflexible telephone service optimized for voice to dynamic IP-based connections offering converged voice, data, and video capabilities. Now, both residential and business users are increasingly more mobile and distributed, as are the cloud-based services, applications, and content they want to utilize. Service providers must therefore support a more diverse customer base with more distributed content and applications across multiple geographies, yet still maintain a secure, reliable, and consistent quality of experience regardless of device and physical location.
In the face of greater traffic demands and the risk of becoming lower-margin “commoditized pipes,” network operators must react to three key challenges: Read More »
Last week during VMworld in San Francisco, I had the chance to sit down with Steve Kaplan (@ROIdude), VP of Virtualization and Cloud, at Presidio, one of Cisco’s largest reseller partners. Steve is an author and industry speaker, especially on financial and ROI impacts of technology. He gives us a great perspective on how his firm is working with customers to get them cloud ready, and some of the virtualization trends he’s seeing with customers and in the industry.
In addition to the video, Steve and a colleague at Presidio published a blog on their web site about why they see customers moving to the Nexus 1000V virtual switch as the foundation for their cloud environments, and what challenges it’s helping them to overcome. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to talk much about the new trends in Software Defined Networking (SDN), programmable virtual network overlays, or OpenStack, but Dom Delfino covers some of these related topics as well in another great video recorded at VMworld last week.
For those of you that think all of our Cisco video productions are tightly scripted, well rehearsed, finely edited affairs, this will convince you otherwise. We tried to keep it pretty interactive and we had a lot of fun doing it. I think you’ll find the insights valuable.
”Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.”
-- Henry Kissinger
Following the early successes with network programmability, the natural question that arises is “where do we go form here?” Certainly some good things have been accomplished, but in many ways the real work is just beginning. David Ward just posted some musings on where we go next with programmatic interfaces for the network--its a good read and I encourage you to check it out.
I developed Intelligent Network (IN) services and platforms during the early 1990s. With IN, Unix based controllers were connected to traditional telephone switches to perform both obscure as well as massively deployed phone services. Some of these services had very large centralized routing databases controlling the ultimate trunk/path selection of calls. Read More »
