Never one to shun conflict or controversy, Cisco has probably created both with its announcement of its SDN strategy at its “Live” event yesterday. It would be fair to say that Cisco didn’t even blow a kiss at OpenFlow, it only promised to blow a kiss at some point in the future. Needless to say, this has polarized the response. The Cisco Open Networking Environment will be touted by some as the holy grail of SDN. Others will declare it to be the work of the devil. It’s a realistic view of SDN benefits and potential, or it’s a cynical attempt to destabilize an emerging and competitive trend. You get to take your pick.
If you strip judgmentalism out of the picture, Cisco’s ONE says that application control of the network is a lot more complicated than just OpenFlow. That’s very true, and I’ve said it here myself. Cisco says that the basic goals of software control of networking can be met in other ways, and that’s true too—and also something I’ve said. Cisco says that OpenFlow is suitable for experimentation and not really much else, and that’s not really true. What is true is that OpenFlow addresses a very small piece of the big SDN pie. For what it does, OpenFlow is arguably a major step forward, but it wasn’t designed to solve a whole business problem and that’s what the market ultimately needs.
OpenFlow lets you APPLY application controls to forwarding, but it doesn’t determine what the control should do. It tells you how to make a single device create a forwarding table entry, but not how to thread a route or pick the best one. These aren’t “failures” of OpenFlow, they’re simply a reflection of the fact that the protocol was designed to allow various systems of software control to be exercised on the network. It doesn’t dictate what those systems are, but in the real world the value of any SDN strategy will be determined not by how you diddle forwarding tables but by how you know what to diddle.
What this adds up to is that ONE may be a kind of OpenFlow-less vision of SDN but it’s not necessarily cynical. I qualify with “necessarily” because you can’t judge motives here. Yes, Cisco is offering alternatives to OpenFlow and clearly prefers those alternatives. But yes, there are reasons for that position that most enterprises would likely agree with. So while I don’t doubt that Cisco is “countering” OpenFlow, it’s also supporting market reality pretty well, and that’s more than can be said for some OpenFlow strategies.
If you want to characterize ONE in a way that will likely delight no one in particular, think of it as “What Junos Space Should/Could Have Been and Isn’t”. It’s a developer framework that offers access to APIs that provide control over network behavior, and as such it is in a position to implement SDN principles on the network. It also includes applications that support the cloud by integrating with popular hypervisors, orchestration of services, etc. In short, it’s really deep down a service layer, but one that crosses the service provider to enterprise boundary and so offers general utility. ONE is a lot more than SDN. It’s not OpenFlow, though, so in that regard it’s (for the moment at least) less. There’s a layer missing in the OpenFlow concept; the layer that creates the holistic connectivity vision that OpenFlow can apply. SDN recognizes this need, and so does Cisco. But Cisco will fix SDN for Cisco. If we want a broader fix, we have to look to the ONF process.
For Cisco’s competitors this is just more bad news. Properly positioned, ONE makes Junos Space irrelevant. Properly positioned, it also makes Alcatel-Lucent’s OneAPI and perhaps even High-Leverage Networking irrelevant. Of course, ONE hasn’t been positioned to do either—yet—so there’s still a window of hope for these guys. For Ericsson and NSN, neither of whom really have a position here yet, ONE sets a pretty high bar but at least a visible one. The trick will be to get out there with something that is well thought out and articulated while there’s still time.
I’ve said this before but I have to say it again. “The cloud” is the future model of network/IT integration. Networking can either contribute a lot to this, or little. In the former case, it adds value and margins to network operators and network vendors. In the latter case it subtracts from margins. In Europe, according to some of today’s Street research, we can expect the growth of smartphone use to drive up capacity needs. This at a time when operators can ill afford to be pushing more capex programs. The expected winners in the Eurocapex shift include Huawei, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. Huawei is the commodity-market winner. Absent value that drives margins up for operators, equipment commoditizes too. I hope that Cisco pushes hard on ONE, and maybe pushes the industry into a little service-layer-vision sanity. I also hope that the ONF realizes that threading a nut onto a bolt is a necessary condition for building a car, but not a sufficient condition.