Cisco, IBM reveal their next SDN moves

10 Oct 2012

Networking giants buys vCider, while IBM unveils its own controller for software-defined networking.

Another week, another software-defined networking announcement: this time, it was Cisco’s turn to take make its next move, with its purchase of vCider, a start-up that focuses on helping corporate data centres link to the cloud.

The technology offered by vCider is not unlike that of Nicira, the company purchased by VMware in July: it places overlay connections on top of a corporate network, so that particular data flows take certain routes and changing traffic patterns can be accommodated. In fact, the purchase has been seen as thinly veiled counter to that earlier acquisition.

In a blog post announcing the purchase, Cisco vice president and head of corporate development Hilton Romanski said that vCider would play an important role in the Cisco Open Networking Environment (ONE) strategy, particular in support of Open Stack.

“With Quantum becoming a core OpenStack service, it’s clear that programmable networking is quickly becoming an important component in large scale, multi-tenant, cloud computing environments,” Romanski explained. “Cisco’s Quantum plug-in is designed to give application developers increased programmability of both virtual and physical networks linking the world of cloud computing to the advanced capabilities of Cisco’s Open Networking Environment (ONE).”

The introduction of a controller is an important addition to the Cisco SDN line-up. Its acquisition of vCider follows hard on the heels of IBM’s 3 October release of its own SDN Controller, the IBM System Networking Programmable Network Controller. This is an SDN software application that runs on a Linux-based platform to provide intelligent networking on the OpenFlow standard, said Rakesh Saha, director of product management for IBM’s system networking division.

“SDN allows users to control their networks with software and treat their networks as a service,” Saha said. “We’ve taken the control plane off the network and run it as software in an appliance. This is known as the SDN controller.”

IBM is also developing an SDN software overlay technology called DOVE (Distributed Overlay Vertical Ethernet) – similar to the approach used by VMware’s Nicira, and now, Cisco’s vCider.

Want to learn more about the software-defined future of IT? At IP EXPO 2012, we invite you to attend our Visionary Panel debate: IT’s evolutionary adoption of software-defined datacentres. Our panelists will be Adrian Keward, senior software architect at Red Hat; Anthony Saxby, information platform product marketing manager at Microsoft; and David Flynn, CEO of Fusion-io. This will take place in the Flash Storage Lab on Wednesday 17 October at 13:30.