Cisco Buys Insieme SDN, Invites Microsoft to ACI Party

The usual qualifier: Chambers noted that Cisco is in a quiet period and the press gathering does not involve earnings or revenue forecasts.

“In the last six months — more CIOs, CEOs and CXOs have come through Silicon Valley looking for innovative ideas.”

“It’s not just about storage, compute and networking coming along. It’s about application-centric infrastructure” and innovation.

Chambers pointed to trends like mobile, social, Big Data and the Internet of Things.

Technology changes are coming every four years or faster — when they used to required a decade.

Familiar theme: Chambers is reiterating his usual pitch stating that Cisco catches market transition waves — from routing to switching and more. This time around, it’s about application-centric infrastructure and the Internet of Everything. “We anticipate the transitions, bounce the ideas with partners and customers, then transition in the market with speed.”

Compared traditional SDN models to the failed ATM to the desktop trend of two decades ago. Instead, a new operating model is required.

“Software-based network virtualization lacks scale, visibility and security.”

“Instead, the future open model is an application infrastructure that combines physical and virtual networks together with scale.”

“It’s really about the applications that go on this that will make the difference.”

Background not mentioned: Cisco has an investment in Insieme, and Insieme could ultimately be a “spin-in” to Cisco over time. Update: The spin-in happened today. Cisco acquired Insieme.

Today’s announcements are about delivering an agile infrastructure.

The announcement involves an application policy infrastructure controller (ACI), and integrates that with the Nexus 9000 Series and an “industry leading ecosystem” including orchestration, hypervisor, storage and layer 4 through 7 companies.

“We’re not just empowering the cloud customers, but also the enterprise, commerical and service provider customers.”

An application-centric policy model. “That’s what you run your business on.”

The architecture has a “pay as you grow model.”

Yes, APIs allow it to extend beyond networking to storage and compute.

The solution delivers six areas of value: Agility, simplicity, automation and visibility, performance and scale, security and open.

“You can’t do it only in software. You need to combine the power of software and hardware innovation.”

She mentioned hypervisor support in this order: Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware… Ouch. Interesting order, The VAR Guy noticed.

OpenStack and OpenDaylight — two of The VAR Guy’s top 5 open source platforms to watch for 2014 — were mentioned.

“Network automation is finally possible.”

She claimed ACI total cost of ownership would deliver a 75 percent total cost of ownership savings.

A graphic claimed that there’s a software virtual machine tax for a two-part software and hardware SDN network. It apparently was a dig at VMware and software providers that have their own SDN strategies. “There is a virtual machine tax of $10 per virtual machine per month, or over $100 per port per month,” she claimed.

Instead, build one network that’s hardware and software and you reduce total cost of ownership by 75 percent, she claimed.