control plane

Cisco’s ISR G2 and Borderless Networking: Service layer implications?

Cisco has announced a new generation of its popular ISR platform (G2, fittingly), and also announced an initiative/architecture called Borderless Networking. The ISR upgrades are performance enhancements to the earlier models based on what Cisco calls the “Service-Ready Engine” that can support Linux applications directly, not through the older AXP insert card.

Borderless Networking is harder to pin down, however. It appears to be what a Cisco PR video calls a “recommitment” of Cisco to some core technologies rather than a new announcement. But it is possible that Cisco will offer something new and substantive there. From the positioning, it appears to be a service-layer strategy focused on creating an “IT control plane” from Cisco’s data center and virtualization technology. Whether it’s real or slideware is the question.

Cisco often makes announcements like this to anticipate announcements by competitors, and a number of them may be planning something in the service layer area within the next month. As we’ve noted, this is a critical area, and if Cisco can create a credible “IT control plane” based on data center virtualization, it could have an impact in the space. Recent trends within Cisco management and organization, however, seem to suggest a de-emphasis on software products and on network abstraction and management, key ingredients in a service-layer strategy.

Cisco’s blade server market entry: Can it work?

Cisco is expected to launch its blade server project “California” today, and there is a lot of disagreement over just what’s coming. Some predict Cisco will enter the data center server market with a hardware product linked to its network virtualization tools. Others think the product will be more Unified-Communications-flavored.

The view that Cisco is getting into the blade server market has been refuted by some Cisco management comments (which doesn’t mean it’s not true, of course), and we believe it would be a major strategic error for Cisco to jump into the data center server market. Cisco will collide with major players like IBM and HP, and the company doesn’t call on IT buyers today.

We’re more inclined to see Cisco going after a different kind of server, something much more like a service delivery platform (SDP). SDP products have existed for a decade, but they’ve been hamstrung by a rather myopic voice focus. Cisco has a chance to create a vision of an SDP that’s focused on voice only as an element of unified communications and collaboration, but that earns its stripes in a value sense by what it can do for non-voice services.

We also believe that Cisco is looking at initiatives like Juniper’s JCS1200 and HP’s ProCurve, the former of which is a product that essentially offloads router control planes to external servers, and the latter is a means of binding applications more tightly to networks (one yet to be truly proven, we’d have to say).

The net of this is that there is clearly a mission for servers to host features and even network control behavior, and this space is pretty vacant at the moment. It’s not going to stay that way, whatever Cisco does with California.

Ericsson develops packet-optical gear for metro surge

Ericsson is fielding a line of packet optical gear designed to address the expected surge in metro networking. The new products will support a T-MPLS control plane, but Ericsson plans to upgrade to the more modern MPLS-TP and is also considering PBT (PBB-TE).

Metro capacity may be driven by a host of factors in 2009 and 2010 and the operators may be more interested than usual in the optical layer. This has implications on the Carrier Ethernet and IP MPLS wars since optical spending tends to encourage operators to deploy some control plane architecture, and that could then pull through either switches or routers.

Juniper separates router control plane processing

Juniper today announced a significant shift in the traditional architecture of routers, one that allows an external server (the JCS 1200) to provide control plane processing for forwarding-plane networks created on Juniper’s line of routers. Traditional router architecture has used either an integrated processor for both data forwarding and control processing, or a separate board within the router for the control plane handling. The new architecture allows an enormous increase in the processing resources available to handle “control plane” activity, which includes the processing of management requests, topology updates, and other IP control packets. Since Juniper has previously announced an “Open Junos” architecture where developers can add logic to the Junos control plane software, this would appear to open the door to embed significant service and feature intelligence in network devices. This in turn could empower service providers to differentiate their services through these embedded features, or to sell access to them as a new revenue source.