Cisco ACI with OpenStack at Redhat Summit – A perfect Pairing

Last week at Redhat Summit in San Francisco, Cisco Data center was well represented in speaking sessions, and solutions expo. I saw lots of traffic at our demo booth featuring Cisco ACI with OpenStack. Customers and Partners alike, showed great interest in how Cisco APIC integrates with OpenStack and enriches Data center operations. We showed the powerful capabilities of Cisco’s Neutron plug-in implementation and how workflow functions like, “create network”, “create subnets and vlan”, “create security groups”, etc. can be elegantly accomplished from the Open Stack console and aligned with the APIC object model via the APIC-Open Stack  API integration. View Demo here: http://youtu.be/pWMXTb237Vk

We also presented in two sessions one titled “Deploying OpenStack with Cisco networking, compute, & storage” and the other  “Automating Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments with Cisco ACI & OpenStack”. We talked about plans to introduce the group policy model from ACI into OpenStack so that  DevOps teams and NetOps teams can streamline and automate their work while focusing on application and tenant needs at a policy level.

The benefit will be that the Group Policy Plugin provides APIs to build Application Network Profiles including service chain requirements.  Both OVS and the ACI Fabric then implement the full policy including distributed L2, L3, and security.   ACI also allows customers to separate tenant polices from operation.  The Tenants manage their applications while the ACI admin manages network operations and infrastructure using policy and it’s all done with automation that speeds up your OpenStack operations.

There was also strong interest in the OpFlex protocol, which Cisco announced at Interop a few weeks ago and how it opens up the ACI policy framework to a broad eco-system. We had lots of other demos showing our Open Stack integration, from a UCS, Nexus 1k, UCS Director stand-point, to round off a 360 degree view of our commitment to broad industry initiatives.

I want to shift focus now to two cool videos recorded last week, by the dynamic team of Joe Onisick and Lilian Quan from the Insieme Business Unit, at Cisco. Joe emphasizes “traffic flows within the ACI Fabric, and application of policy”, while Lilian covers the magic behind how “traffic is handled within the ACI fabric” with emphasis on re-route, bounce, ARP flooding avoidance, etc.,

Stay tuned for more videos on the ACI Fabric mode in near future. We also have a slew of whitepapers coming up that will cover the APIC/ACI Fabric innovations. Check out the recently posted APIC Policy Model whitepaper  that walks you through the basics of the object oriented policy model, Spine-Leaf network architecture and its benefits, APIC policy enforcement, Unicast/Multi-cast policy enforcement, concept of end-point groups (EPG) and all related concepts that you would find extremely valuable as you consider a policy based network architecture for your Data center needs.

I will be covering more exciting news on the ACI front, as we approach Cisco Live San Francisco. Stay tuned

Reference Links

APIC Policy Model whitepaper http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/application-centric-infrastructure/white-paper-c11-731310.html

OpFlex – An Open policy protocol http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/application-centric-infrastructure/white-paper-c11-731304.html

OpFlex – An open source approach http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/application-centric-infrastructure/white-paper-c11-731303.html

(ACI-OpenStack demo) http://youtu.be/fYQDvKVg-ag

(Opflex announcement) http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/introducing-opflex-a-new-standards-based-protocol-for-application-centric-infrastructure/