Key aspects of Cisco’s mission to transform business include accelerating time to revenue, reducing operational costs, and deploying new services at web speed. With Cisco’s technology innovation in SDN and NFV, today we announce a partnership with Cisco to provide an integrated NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) solution designed to accelerate SDN deployments in service provider environments. The integration enables rapid modernization of infrastructures in the highly competitive service provider space.
“This partnership is another step in delivering on our strategy for an open, modular and expandable network architecture,” said Charles Stucki, vice president and general manager, Network Functions Virtualization Business Unit, Cisco. “We are committed to helping our service provider customers successfully deploy virtualized network functions.”
Easy-to-Use Technology for Service Providers
With the growth of mobile, IP and video traffic over the next five years, service providers are transforming their networks using virtualization for greater scalability, operational simplicity and service velocity. To help ensure service providers deliver the best-connected experience to their customers, together, we are offering technology that is easy to use, open-standard based, carrier-class performance and secure.
Service providers choose the NFVI solution with SDN to more efficiently design, deploy and manage their networks and IT services. The jointly developed Zenoss-Cisco solution is tightly integrated software that offers a centralized management for increased visibility, performance and capacity management, as well as improved service reliability. The deployment components include a combination of Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS) and Nexus systems, the Cisco Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) based on RedHat OpenStack — the core NFV infrastructure of Cisco VIM — and Zenoss Service Dynamics (ZSD) for NFVI.
The Zenoss-Cisco Integration
The Zenoss-Cisco NFVI integration will enable service providers to:
• Accelerate NFV and software-defined networking deployments
• Automate monitoring and provisioning of systems and applications in highly dynamic NFV environments
• Improve performance and capacity planning to most efficiently use all computing resources at all times
• Identify software and hardware components throughout the stack that could affect service reliability for tenants and NFV instances
• Ensure service health and reliability at massive scale
• Simplify relationship modeling and accelerate issue root-cause analysis
• Easily deploy (days to hours) to life cycle management, i.e., time to value (TTV)
• Manage life cycle — point of delivery, updates and upgrades — critical in this CI/CD world
• Augment by integrated tools such as centralized logging and monitoring and health checks
All are essential capabilities when trying to operate and maintain a carrier-class OpenStack-based NFV cloud that is hosting business-critical services without downtime and while meeting client service-level agreements (SLAs).
Building NFV-based network services on top of an OpenStack architecture is not a journey to be taken by the faint hearted. OpenStack is proving to have the necessary ingredients to balance out the necessary CAPEX and OPEX costs. However, it still maturing and evolving daily and has proven to be a challenge for a service provider seeking these critical capabilities.
To meet the needs of service providers, Cisco and Zenoss, together with other best-in-class partners and their long history with the service provider business, have put together what we believe is one of the best-in-class end-to-end solutions in the marketplace today.
