Cisco, Arista, HP: SDN Strategies

In the second part of this series examining vendors' SDN products, I look at Cisco ACI, Arista's programmable approach, and HP's commitment to OpenFlow.

Kurt Marko, Contributing Editor

April 17, 2014

1 Min Read
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In the first part of this series on vendors' software-defined networking (SDN) strategies, I discussed the SDN landscape and the most recent InformationWeek SDN Survey, which showed that most vendors have a long way to go when it comes to explaining their SDN plans. In this post, I'll examine SDN products from Cisco, Arista, and HP.

Cisco
While Cisco has dabbled in SDN technology for years, it lacked a coherent plan for how IT teams could embrace its vision for software-controlled infrastructure and services while preserving investments in the vast array of hardware already deployed.

That changed in November when the company announced its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), a grand blueprint that goes beyond low-level flow control and virtual network management to include enterprise-wide regulation and automation of application use, performance and security policies, orchestration of virtual network services, and management of physical and virtual network configuration.

Read the rest of this story on Network Computing.

About the Author

Kurt Marko

Contributing Editor

Kurt Marko is an InformationWeek and Network Computing contributor and IT industry veteran, pursuing his passion for communications after a varied career that has spanned virtually the entire high-tech food chain from chips to systems. Upon graduating from Stanford University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering, Kurt spent several years as a semiconductor device physicist, doing process design, modeling and testing. He then joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a memory chip designer and CAD and simulation developer.Moving to Hewlett-Packard, Kurt started in the laser printer R&D lab doing electrophotography development, for which he earned a patent, but his love of computers eventually led him to join HP’s nascent technical IT group. He spent 15 years as an IT engineer and was a lead architect for several enterprisewide infrastructure projects at HP, including the Windows domain infrastructure, remote access service, Exchange e-mail infrastructure and managed Web services.

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