In our last blog, we talked about the next generation Internet. It will be about the Internet of Everything­ ─ people-to-people, machine-to-machine, machine-to-people, trillions of things coming online in coming years. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is only part of the overall solution.  Real-time intelligence, automation and orchestration, instantaneous responsiveness, and unprecedented business and operational agility require a much broader approach. At Cisco we’re already creating the network of the future with our integrated framework, the Cisco Open Network Environment (Cisco ONE).

So now let’s come down to Earth and explore what all of this really means to an average service provider. What new capabilities and use cases does Cisco ONE enable right now?  How does what we’re doing lay another building block for the Internet of Everything?

Start by Visualizing Your Network Read More »

Tags: Cisco ONE, Internet of Everything, Open Network Environment, SDN, Service Provider, software defined network

We’re 13 years into the new millennium and we still don’t have flying cars, house cleaning robot maids or refrigerators that talk back to us.  Not everything predicted for our Jetson-like future came true — or maybe not as quickly as expected.  Yet, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.   Our industry talked about triple play voice, video and data services for more than a decade.  Today we watch videos or TV on smart phones, tablets, PCs and television sets while texting friends, playing games or surfing simultaneously on any number of devices from anywhere.   Technology has a way of catching up to our vision of the future.  So don’t bet against innovation.

The next big thing is the Internet of Everything (IoE).  It’s one part evolution and one part revolution.   Network traffic is migrating from people-to-people communication to people-to-things.  The network shift to machine-to-machine (M2M) or Read More »

Tags: Cisco ONE, Cisco Open Network Environment, Internet of Everything, Service Provider, software defined network

Topics such as Software Defined Networking and programmable networks are of great interest to many network operators these days. With that in mind we’re pleased to kick off a new series of Webcasts to help our customer learn more about Cisco’s Open Network Environment strategy.

Please join us on April 9, 2013 at 9:00 am Pacific Time / 12:00 pm Eastern Time for an educational webcast featuring Ayman Sayed, Cisco Senior Vice President of the Network Operating Systems Technology Group. As part of the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) educational series, this session will focus on the Cisco One Platform Kit (onePK). Speakers will talk through how this easy-to-use toolkit provides users access to the valuable data and services inside the network for development, automation and rapid service creation with Cisco’s onePK SDK.

During the hour, Cisco technology experts will join with industry leaders to discuss their experience with Cisco’s onePK. Industry experts include:

• Kamil Knotek, Chief of Research and Development, Pramacom Prague spol. s r.o.
• Brendon Whateley, Principal Solutions Architect, Starview Inc.

Subject matter experts will also be on hand to answer your questions live. Read More »

Tags: Cisco ONE, onePK, Open Network Environment, Service Provider, software defined network, webinar

Programmability, application aware environments, and software defined networks are popular topics in the industry right now. Network operators see the revenue opportunities to deliver services which can dynamically utilize network infrastructure while meeting application specific requirements. This thought process dominated at this year’s Carrier Ethernet World Congress in Barcelona, and Cisco was helping lead the way.

It was a pleasure to watch some of our thought leaders share their unique and innovative ideas and direction with the larger service provider, vendor and analyst community – starting with Software Defined Networking (SDN).  SDN wasn’t the only topic, we shared ideas around mobile trends such as 4G/LTE and small cells and the resulting network impact, the increasing need to marry the IP layer with the underlying transport layers, and strategies around moving legacy TDM services onto a packet infrastructure.  I love watching the cross-industry creativity flow as we collectively solve today’s challenges posed by the growth of new user trends.

All that said, Read More »

Tags: Carrier Ethernet World Congress, Cisco, NPS, ONE, onePK, Open Network Environment, SDN, Service Provider, software defined network

Lately I’ve been seeing some industry people trying to apply the principles of data center network fabric models to their Wide Area Networks (WANs), and implying that such can be extended through service provider WANs.  Data center fabrics and WANs are horses of very different colors with way too many differences for these perspectives to hold up.

Fundamentally they are different beasts with one more easily tamed than the other.   Data center networks generally have well known end points and well-ordered designs.

Multi-tenant Data Center Designs

Bandwidth within data centers is virtually unlimited relative to WAN bandwidth.  It is much more stable and constrained in its characteristics when it comes to things like latency, loss, jitter, capacity, restoration capabilities – all of which have significant influence on WAN services delivery.  The same data center network assumptions exist between each of the end points, which makes fabric modeling for data centers generally a good approximation and thus possible to use.

Some private WANs that interconnect data centers may align closely enough with a fabric model, making it a good enough approximation.  But this is a unique case and is essentially Read More »

Tags: cloud, data center, datacenter, SDN, Service Provider, sla, software defined network, WAN