INTRODUCTION:
Integration is one of those technology jargon words that gets tossed around far too much these days. Add the adjective “seamless” in front of it, you got the makings of truly great game of buzzword bingo. Hence, you can understand my slight hesitation in making integration the centerpiece of our Marketing plan at Cisco Live US this week in lovely San Diego, who, ironically enough, actually holds a whole event all about integration.
I really need not have worried though, as I can confidently write that our integration is better than their integration, paraphrasing a reputed quote from the legendary rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun. The integration I’m referring to involves our core product, the Avi Networks Cloud Application Delivery Platform (CADP) with the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), which we successfully completed and made available to our customers via our latest code release, v15.1. You can get more details of this in the press release that we issued ahead of Cisco Live.
But how is it better? Simply put, Avi Network’s integration with Cisco ACI arguably enables the only true “full stack”, layers 2 through 7, software-defined networking (SDN) solution commercially available in the industry today, something that SDxCentral pointed out in their coverage of our news. We enable this at the architectural level by remaining true to the SDN principle of a singular centralized control plane with highly distributed and virtualized data planes. This is a key differentiator of Avi Networks that sets us apart from legacy application delivery products, whether they’re offered up as hardware appliances or even as virtual appliances.
The point is, the ability for the Avi CADP to present single point of integration at the control layer is important because the Cisco ACI shares this common architecture, enabling a clean, simple 1-2-1 integration model. Compare that to how legacy ADC appliances with self-contained OS/control/data have to integrate into the Cisco ACI through a much more complex n-2-1 model. It’s a point that both Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research but writing for Network World and Jim Carroll of Converge! Network Digest picked up on in their respective articles, here and here. Graphically, here’s how the two models compare:
Comparison of the Avi integration model with legacy ADC appliances.
The benefits of this simpler integration are numerous but I can boil them down to three, as shown in this graphic.
CONCLUSION:
These benefits reinforce the rationale for why companies such as Avi Networks and Cisco are fully engaged in the still-emerging yet rapidly growing SDN market. Customers, consumer and enterprise alike, demand simple, flexible, and smart from whatever technologies they invest in today. The consumerization of IT is in full effect and SDN is one of its critical paths to success in the enterprise data center realms. That’s why the Avi integration with the Cisco ACI is different and better. But don’t just take my word for it. Swing by our booth (#3309) at Cisco Live and put our claims to test. You may even walk away with one of these soon-to-be-treasured items:
