The constant need for more speed, mobility, and insatiable demands for access to information, continues to strain the capacity of service provider networks around the globe. In essence, whatever capacity made available will be consumed.

An open question on the minds of the operators -- how can they leverage SDN to not only keep up with these demands but maintaining a highly profitable network business? Such was the topic of conversation amongst operators and our CTO, David Ward, during a panel discussion at the recent Broadband World Forum (BBWF) in Amsterdam.

What lies in the balance for operators — a plethora of Read More »

Tags: broadband, Cisco, cloud, digital economy, innovation, ONE, Open Network Environment, SDN, Service Provider, virtualization

By Uwe Lambrette, Director, Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group

Amsterdam may be the one place on earth where it rains more than it does in London. So, it was no surprise that I encountered stormy weather on my flight to Broadband World Forum (BBWF) 2012. As things turned out, the conference theme and the weather were clearly aligned, since the BBWF is fiercely embracing evolution to cloud. Here are some core themes that emerged as I shared some of Cisco IBSG’s findings at the conference:

Cloud 2.0: Most service providers (SPs) have already launched an initial cloud offering and are now beginning to measure scaling and growth. The initial offering is often a stand-alone cloud solution, typically focused on infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Once their original implementation goes live, SPs often need to focus on the following improvements: Read More »

Tags: BBWF, broadband, Broadband World Forum, Cisco, cloud, cloud 2.0, cloud economics, cloud go-to-market strategy, cloud service brokers, Hybrid Cloud, IaaS, IBSG, infrastructure as a service, network and cloud integration, SaaS, SDN, SDNs, Service Provider, software as a service, software defined networking

True Story:  When my son was about 3, I took him to go see his first movie  in an actual movie theater.  They had just built a brand new theater near our home and he was suitably impressed with all the bright shiny lights.  Anyway, we got our popcorn and grabbed our seats just as the lights were dimming (you never really go anywhere quickly when an inquisitive toddler is involved). We got through the movie trailers, then, to my surprise, my son popped out of his seat and said he was ready to go home.  Being his first movie-going experience, he thought the trailers were the big deal and did not realize we had not yet gotten to the featured attraction.

Tags: Cisco Open Network Environment, future, OpenFlow, OpenStack, SDN

So, with our announcements around OpenStack this week a few folks have asked me how OpenStack fits into our broader strategies like Cisco Open Network Environment. The short answer is “quite well, actually”, the longer answer follows.

If you look back our original introduction of the Cisco Open Network Environment, we made a couple of points—there is a plurality of use cases and as a result, there need to be a plurality of enabling technologies. While there are common objectives such as agility and programmability to better handle the macro trends like cloud and virtualization, the truth is, everyone has their own design objectives and priorities. To that sentiment, I might add that folks have varying operational objectives and priorities—the appetite for the amount of risk and complexity they want to take on.

With the three-pillar structure of the Open Network Environment, we feel like we have given folks the flexibility to choose the right technologies for the job. With initiatives like OpenStack we now support a different kind of flexibility.

While a segment of the market seems to want to start writing their own protocols and hand-wiring flow tables, a different segment of the market is moving in the other direction, expressing a desire to get out of the infrastructure business and focus their time and efforts on their apps and their users—this has traditionally been the Vblock and FlexPod crowd. With OpenStack, they now have another option—they get the programmability we talk about with the Open Network Environment, but at the stack level, instead of at the box level. The idea behind something like the Cisco Edition of OpenStack is simplify the task and reduce the risks of standing up a cloud stack. You have the full Folsom release of OpenStack, some Puppet recipes to simplify deployment and validation against the relevant Cisco hardware (follow that last link for details).

To get more insights into our OpenStack announcements this week, check our this blog by Lew Tucker, our VP/CTO for Cloud Computing and this post by Kyle Mestery, one of the many Cisco folks who has invested a great deal of time and effort in OpenStack.

One final thought. We are a long way from being done yet. In just the last few days, I blogged about how our Virtuata and vCider acquisitions fit into a multi-cloud strategy, we have had the aforementioned posts related to this week’s OpenStack announcements, and Rodrigo Flores just posted about our Multi-Cloud Acceleration Kits for our Intelligent Automation for Cloud solution. While cloud is the destination, there are many ways to get there as we have customers and we will continue to innovate and partner on a number of fronts and in a number of ways that will likely surprise some folks. Stay tuned.

Tags: Cisco Open Network Environment, Cloud Computing, FlexPod, OpenStack, programmability, SDN, Vblock, virtualization

Did I tell you that we have a contest currently underway?  In case you missed it,  you still have till midnight PST today to answer 5 easy questions with multiple choices. One correct answer makes you eligible to win an iPAD.

Questions this week are about Cisco ONE (Open Networking Environment ) -- Perfect timing as you are  maybe preparing your participation to Openstack Summit (we do!) in San Diego.  But even if you don’t plan to go,  I am sure that you heard about SDN -- Haven’t you?

OK,  here are the questions:

Read More »

Tags: Cisco, contest, data center, iPad, ONE, SDN, Unified iQ