Cisco SDN Guru Speaks Out On ACI Adoption, Competition With VMware, Arista

Cisco: Our ACI Strategy Is 'Very Sound'

Soni Jiandani knows a thing or two about the data center. A 21-year Cisco vet, Jiandani has led the charge on several Cisco "spin-ins," including Nuovo Systems, whose core technology became the basis for Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS). More recently, Jiandani was senior vice president of Insieme, the software-defined networking spin-in Cisco formally acquired last year. As such, Jiandani has played a key role in the development of Cisco's Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI), the networking titan's flagship SDN platform that leverages a mix of hardware (namely, its new line of Nexus 9000 switches) and software (APIC controller, which ships in June). Jiandani sat down with CRN last week to talk ACI adoption, what's next for Cisco in SDN and how ACI stacks up against rival technology from VMware and Arista Networks. Here's what she had to say.

Talk About Customer Traction Around ACI

We are starting to track 800 prospects for the products since launch on Nov. 6. We have shipped a whole range of Nexus platforms, including the Nexus eight-slot system, the 9508, and two flavors of the top-of-rack switches, which have the capabilities to run in stand-alone mode, as classic Layer 2 and Layer 3 switches, as well as be applied to a software upgrade to run in ACI mode. We also have started to ship the four-slot system, so not just the merchant-only line cards for 40 [Gigabit Ethernet], but also the merchant-plus cards that support 10 [Gigabit Ethernet] and future-proofness with ACI.

We also won the Interop product of the year award for the Nexus 9516 (pictured).

In What Markets Are You Seeing ACI Adoption?

We continue to focus across 40 customers who are trialing the APIC simulator. APIC is our Application Policy Infrastructure Controller. We are seeing good results across all geographies, across all segments of the market -- enterprise, service providers, cloud providers, as well as public sector and commercial customers -- so there is a healthy mix across all types of customers. Some of the successes we have publicly talked about are [with] three cloud providers, including SunGard, Telstra and du, who have decided to offer cloud services to their customers based on ACI, and are building their infrastructures with Cisco Nexus switching. We have also started to share that we are seeing good success in the financial services market, with three out of the top five financial services [organizations] starting to buy into the Nexus 9000.

What's The Expected ROI For ACI Customers?

The first customer of all technologies we build at Cisco is Cisco IT. So I would like to share the ROI that they believe they will be experiencing.

If I look at the Cisco IT savings, there are two aspects to it. One is the simplification through automation of the operations of the network, and not just the physical but the virtual, as well. What used to take, in terms of provisioning and operations, weeks, will now shrink down to minutes. So one [aspect] is the agility factor and the process simplification through automation that you get through ACI.

What About ROI In Terms Of Cost Savings?

[Cisco IT] did an analysis where they looked at total cost savings [in] pre-ACI versus post-ACI [environments], and the metrics our team is telling us they want to be measured against is to drive a 41 percent cost savings.

Some of the elements that drive that cost savings is going to come from reducing complexity and, therefore, reducing management costs by 21 percent; having the opportunity to drive greater business agility by driving [down] the total network provisioning time by 58 percent; the ability to have a much more reduced power and cooling envelope that will drive a lower operating cost by 45 percent; and the ability to have optimization of the way they use their resources like compute and storage that will drive a further savings of another 10 percent.

How Does Cisco ACI Differ From VMware NSX?

The first [difference] is physical and virtual. The world is not only virtual; the world is physical and virtual. If you listen to IDC they say that two-thirds of all compute assets in the data center between the years of 2016 and 2017 will be physical, and one-third will be virtualized. And even within that one-third that is virtualized, from a server virtualization perspective, is multivendor hypervisors. So in the enterprise, it would be not just VMware, but MS as well.

So it's very important that network virtualization, which is fundamentally one of the elements of the technology that ACI embraces as we drive toward more automation, has to take care of the physical and the virtual and multivendor hypervisors. So that is one key differentiation [between ACI and NSX].

Competitors Say ACI Isn't 'Open.' What's Your Response?

I believe that for something to be open … [you need] a set of open APIs, a set of open standards, a set of open source. It can not only be one. It has to be a collection of all three. ... A policy model is [also] important, because everybody can then automate around a common policy language. …That's why the whole notion of standardization is important. Standardization is giving the customer flexibility and choice. That's why we [are driving] standards efforts around [our SDN protocol] OpFlex.

Now, open source -- what have we done in open source since we launched ACI? We have taken that policy model and put it into open source for OpenDaylight. What that does is allow a customer to say, 'If tomorrow I don’t want to buy Cisco's APIC controller, I can go to OpenDaylight.' That's choice."

What's The Connection Between ACI And Cisco InterCloud?

One of the key things in the InterCloud strategy is the notion that Cisco believes we will be a world of connected, federated "inter-clouds" going forward. We will have our apps that we will host in our cloud, and that will be based on ACI. We will have in-country partners who we will enable, so that they can be cloud providers to customers in-country, like Telstra. And Telstra, in the same vein, said, 'Yes, I am going to go with ACI.'

...In addition, we want to be cognizant of the fact that the world will also have public clouds out there and Software-as-a-Service cloud offerings, and that InterCloud [needs to be] accommodating of those architectures.

Does Arista Networks' Recent IPO Poise A Threat To Cisco?

I view them to be a niche competitor. For us, when we introduce platforms like the Nexus 9000, it's not just the ability for us to drive next-gen data center blueprints for our customers toward 10 [Gigabit Ethernet] and 40 [Gigabit Ethernet]. For us, it is also driving the architectural efficiencies that they will drive with ACI. If I look at our history in switching for 21 years, we have always had niche competitors. They come and go. It's part of being a market leader in our industry -- to make sure we are not just thinking about best-of-breed products, which is very important and why we continue to innovate with platforms like the Nexus 9000, but we also want to future-proof it, with technologies like ACI as a software grade and drive a level of IT transformation. ...I think [Arista] will be challenged, because when you are in the middle, it's the worst place to be. You have the threat from the bottom and from the top.

What Does Insieme Look Like Post-Cisco Acquisition?

Basically, we are structured like a business unit or a business group within the company, and it is structured to report into our CEO John Chambers (pictured).

We kept the entire entity intact as we moved it into Cisco. We work with a management team that consists of Mario Mazzola, who is one of the co-founders of Insieme, Luca Cafiero, who is another co-founder of Insieme, and Prem Jain, who is the third co-founder. These three leaders head the Insieme unit, and the rest of the organization reports into them.

What's The Next Step For Cisco In SDN?

It's all about execution from here for us. We now need to make sure we are making our customers very successful with the Nexus 9000 deployments, and that we are conducting the technology transitions from 1 to 10 [Gigabit Ethernet] and 10 to 40 to 100 [Gigabit Ethernet].

It's very important for us, as we make ACI and APIC shipping in that time frame in June, that we start to drive production-worthy deployments with our customers, and that they articulate the before- and after- ACI effects around opex reductions and efficiencies and their ability to do business faster as a result of this tech. We have got our work cut out for us, in terms of working on execution. But, ultimately, the ACI strategy is very sound, our customers are embracing the technologies ... now, it's just about plain, old execution.