Over the past several years, there’s been an emerging trend in the networking industry that has been heading away from physical infrastructure and towards virtual/cloud environments. As a result, open source router software has begun to shift the tides, challenging the traditional networking equipment deployed in most current data centers. The most popular advancement in this realm has been the release of the open source CloudRouter Project, which was formed as a collaborative effort between CloudBees, Cloudius Systems, IIX, Nginx and the OpenDaylight Project.
This open source router project developed as part of an internal need that cloud service providers had for high-quality SDN and router distribution. What it looks to do is reduce the cost of networking by replacing proprietary routers and switches based on custom ASIC processors with software that runs on standard x86 servers. And while the project is still relatively young, it’s having a clear impact in the market.
SDN, CloudRouter and Cisco ACI
The last several years have seen exponential advancement in the development of software to support open networking, with the CloudRouter Project now allowing for network equipment to be managed by external devices such as commodity servers. The benefits of this means that it will be cheaper and easier to build and manage large-scale networks.
While the CloudRouter Project only recently emerged on the scene, it marks a clear shift in the network infrastructure industry. This shift is most evident when looking at Cisco’s unveiling of their own approach to programming the network known as Application Centric Infrastructure. They’ve been developing this new ACI approach after acquiring Insieme Networks, an SDN-focused startup founded by former Cisco execs.
Their ACI program hopes to reduce the time it takes to provision, change or remove applications, using a new Nexus 9000 switch. This new switch is the key building block for Cisco’s ACI solution, enabling the transition to ACI-mode of NX-OS with a software upgrade and the addition of a controller. Cisco claims that “unlike traditional SDN controllers, it operates independently of switch data and control planes, allowing the network to respond to endpoint changes even when the APIC is offline.” They hope that this flexibility in how their application networks are defined will help them to to rival the current advancements in SDN.