The Insieme team (INSBU) at Cisco has been working hard for three years bringing some major advances to Cisco’s Nexus portfolio. The two key platforms we’ve developed are Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and the Nexus 9000 data center switching platform. One of the biggest projects and innovations we’ve focused on is the operating system (OS) itself on the Nexus 9000 and 3000 platforms (more platforms to follow.) This OS is known as Cisco open NXOS. The focus here is on open programmability of network functionality on a device-by-device or system level basis.
Lots of features and supported tools have been baked into the OS to produce the industry’s leading OS for network automation and programmability. These tools drive faster time-to-market for new applications and services, better integration with automation and orchestration systems, and lowered Operating Expenses (OpEx). Some of the key features baked into the OS are:
- DevOps tooling for automation and orchestration
- Open 3rd party application integrations
- Open object-based APIs, python scripting, Linux native tool access, and access to the underlying BRCM shell.
The overall goal is customer choice. Networking and Software Defined Networking (SDN) is not a one size fits all technology. The needs of cloud providers, carrier networks, enterprise, commercial, financials, etc. are all different. With that in mind we built in the most popular existing and emerging tools to provide customers the ability to use the tool(s) that best support their operational model. This, while being built on the foundation for Cisco ACI, the industries lead SDN solution.
Rather than bore you with my babble I’ll let the experts show you what we’ve developed. The video below is a Demo Friday with SDx Central. Two of my colleagues: Technical marketing Engineer Nicolas Delecroix, and Product Manager Shane Corbin put this content and demo together for your viewing pleasure.
https://www.sdxcentral.com/network-programmability-cisco-demofriday/
For another look and some more info see the video the folks at Cisco TechWise TV put together here: http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le21/onlineevts/offers/twtv/en/twtv176/preview.html