The Network. Intuitive.

The Network. Intuitive.

A New Network for a New Era

Well, the cat is finally out the bag…

I’ve been biting my lips for the last several months working on campus designs with customers. That’s because internally at Cisco, all the buzz was around bringing SDN and most importantly intent driven networking to the campus in a BIG way. This is very much akin to how Cisco transformed the data center with ACI. In fact, I’ve heard verbatim from customers “why doesn’t Cisco have an ACI like solution for the campus?”.

Like a said earlier, I had to bite my lip each time I heard this comment unless we went through the mutual NDA process and even then we provided only a brief glimpse at what was coming.

I’d like to focus on ACI fabric automation and deployment when I draw a comparison to what I envision software defined access (SD-Access/SDA) will be.

In an ACI data center, I simply cable my spine/leaf switches and plug in my APIC controllers to the leaf.  I then go through a 5 minute setup process to define my credentials, TEP pool, infrastructure VLAN ID, and a couple other simple prompts on the APIC controller.

At this point, my ACI fabric is ready to go and all I need to do is register my leaf switches to the fabric , give them a name and ID and I’m off to the object/policy creation steps. Once my policy model and objects are set, it really becomes rinse and repeat. The key with this intent based networking is agility and automation at scale.

I didn’t have to give each leaf a management IP, specify VLANs, credentials, access methods, trunk ports, setup routing protocols, etc… While that’s how I’ve been doing things for over two decades, recently my eyes were open to what happens to that traditional/static model at scale. Quite frankly, it falls apart unless you got some awesome scripting folks automating box-by-box configs with tools like ansible/jinja/python.

In addition, native/embedded security is critical to detect and mitigate threats in the campus network. Detecting threats in encrypted traffic is a pretty amazing “nerd knob”.

In closing, I see a bright future for the campus network.  A future where the campus wired/wireless/WAN have embedded security functionality, deep contextual information (abstract subnet/vlan ID) of attached devices, is intent driven to allow automation at scale, and intuitive enough to deliver actionable and predictive insights.

If you’re going to Cisco Live next week, expect some major deep dive sessions on Cat9K, Cisco DNA, and more.

-shaun

#WeAreCisco #Innovation

#CiscoDNA #NetworkIntuitive

Links & References

Comments are closed.