UPTIME PRSRT S TD U.S. POS TA GE PAID Tulsa, OK Permit No. 2146
Sigma
Uptime
volume 13 number 6Citrix and Cisco offer
tightly integrated
technologies that support
an application-centric
approach to network
management and control.
APPS
RULE!
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www.sigmasol.com 888.895.0495
Welcome to the Application-Centric Infrastructure
Today’s IT organizations are under significant pressure to deliver applications faster and with greater frequency than ever before. Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a unique new model designed to accelerate application deployment from months to minutes.
In the Cisco ACI framework, applications guide networking behavior, not the other way around. Cisco ACI is built to unify and manage network, storage, hypervisors, security and applications as a single entity. By automating the provisioning of the complete
application network, Cisco ACI helps lower IT costs, reduce errors, accelerate deployment, and make the business more agile.
Contact Sigma to learn how this new view of data center resources can help your organization achieve greater productivity, consistency and agility.
Contents
Apps Rule
Application-centric networking is designed to
improve IT agility by shifting the emphasis from
managing individual servers and network gear
to managing the resources needed to support
a particular application. Citrix and Cisco offer
tightly integrated technologies that facilitate this
approach.
The Future of SDN
Software-defi ned networking (SDN) can make
networks more manageable, effi cient and scalable.
However, vendors and industry leaders must
continue to collaborate on standards and best
practices that simplify SDN architecture and keep
networks secure.
The Open-Source Cloud
OpenStack is an open-source cloud software
platform that is increasingly being used as
the infrastructure backbone for private cloud
deployments. OpenStack can control large pools
of compute, storage and networking resources to
deliver improved visibility, speed, fl exibility and
agility.
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ULE!
Citrix and Cisco offer
tightly integrated
technologies that support
an application-centric
approach to network
management and control.
I
n today’s fast-paced world of mobility and the cloud, an application-centric approach has be-come more critical than ever to achieving IT agility. IT administrators must be able to deploy applications rapidly across physical and virtual infrastructure while delivering the performance, scalability and security that users demand. An application-centric approach shifts the emphasis from managing individual servers and network gear to man-aging the resources needed to support a particular applica-tion. Success is measured by metrics such as response time and availability.“Traditionally, administrators have been concerned with managing routers, switches and gateways and ensuring the effi cient movement of data across that environment,” said Bryan McCandless, Business Development Manager, Sigma Solutions. “In an application-centric model, you start with the application and optimize the network from that perspective.”
Software-defi ned networking (SDN) has been touted as the ideal platform for the application-centric approach because of its ability to provision and allocate network re-sources dynamically. However, most SDN controllers focus on data packets rather than the application layer. They lack the visibility to adjust to changing application requirements. Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) archi-tecture better facilitates this new approach. Cisco ACI is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and pol-icy-driven application profi les. It consists of Cisco Nexus 9000 switches and the centralized Application Policy Infra-structure Controller (APIC) to create an end-to-end solution that can quickly respond to an application’s changing needs.
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Citrix NetScaler application deliv-ery controllers (ADCs) work in sync with Cisco ACI to keep policies such as load balancing, security, availability and performance close to applications. NetScaler leverages Cisco APIC to au-tomatically provision and control net-work resources based upon application requirements.
“Cisco and Citrix have built a strong partnership that gives custom-ers unprecedented control over their networks from an application perspec-tive,” McCandless said. “Thanks to the deep integration of NetScaler with Cis-co ACI, customers can use NetScaler in concert with ACI to create, deploy and control network services to support an application.”
Visibility and Control
Cisco ACI is the fi rst data center and cloud solution to offer full visibil-ity and integrated management of both physical and virtual network resources, accelerating application deployment through a dynamic, application-aware network policy model. It combines traditional high-performance network switches with intelligent management
and automation to form a “zero-touch” fabric.
The Cisco APIC appliance is at the core of automation and management for the ACI fabric, bringing together phys-ical, virtual and cloud infrastructure management in a common, open frame-work that allows for the integration of third-party Layer 4 through 7 services, virtualization and management.
“With ACI, Cisco has created a software-defi ned network that func-tions as one unifi ed system at the fab-ric level,” said McCandless. “The entire network becomes an intelligent trans-port mechanism controlled by the ap-plication-aware APIC appliance. By em-bracing open standards and APIs, ACI also provides choice and investment protection.”
NetScaler integrates with ACI on two levels. Native network integration allows both physical and virtual NetS-caler appliances to be dynamically in-serted anywhere in the network based upon workload requirements. Cisco ACI treats services as an integral part of an application, and provides the ap-plication with the NetScaler resources it needs without having to physically
move or reconfi gure any component. Automation and telemetry inte-gration enable the APIC automation module to instantiate, confi gure and re-confi gure NetScaler for a variety of use cases. REST-based APIs allow APIC to control a wide range of NetScaler fea-tures, including load balancing, applica-tion and content acceleraapplica-tion, integrat-ed caching and security.
“ACI’s central point of network control combines with NetScaler service policy coordination and automation to improve data center operations and application deployment. The open API framework of Cisco ACI automates net-work and service provisioning on Citrix NetScaler appliances, providing end-to-end telemetry and application visibili-ty,” McCandless said. “Cisco ACI and automation framework are compatible with existing NetScaler implementa-tions, preserving existing service opera-tional models and leveraging standard protocols.”
Tight Integration
The Citrix/Cisco partnership ex-tends beyond ACI to include the inte-gration of NetScaler with Cisco
Nex-Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) leverages a unique approach to network programmability and management. It uses a cen-tralized Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to automate and manage physical and virtual data center fabrics. Unlike older SDN controllers, it supplies application policy — not confi guration — to network devices, allowing them to self-confi gure. Its policy focus makes APIC much more extensible to all network devices and simplifi es integration of new infrastructure with a customer’s preferred management, automation and cloud orchestration systems, for coordinated, comprehensive automation of the entire infrastructure. It also allows the ACI infrastructure to achieve a level of scale and resiliency unattainable by existing SDN solutions.
Components of the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure include: • The Nexus 9000 switch portfolio running optimized NX-OS.
• The Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), the unifi ed point of automation and management for the ACI fabric, policy programming and health monitoring, supporting any application anywhere.
• Application Network Profi les, which defi ne the requirements of an application and its interdependencies on the underlying infra-structure. The APIC uses these profi les to dynamically provision compute, storage, networking and security policies, no matter where the application is or how it changes.
us 7000 series switches. Cisco’s Remote Integrated Service Engine (RISE) protocol allows a third-party service appliance such as NetScaler to be plugged into a switch port yet function as if it were connected to the switch’s backplane. Citrix NetScaler and the Cisco Prime Network Analysis Module are the fi rst service appliances to be certifi ed as “RISE-enabled.”
“Cisco RISE causes NetScaler to func-tion as if it were a service module within the Nexus 7000 switch even though it remains a physically separate device that is confi gured through its own interface,” said McCandless. “RISE provides improved network traffi c visibility and optimization while simplifying deployment.”
Cisco and Citrix have also partnered to integrate NetScaler technology into the Cisco Unifi ed Fabric Cloud Network Services port-folio. The result is NetScaler 1000V, a best-in-class virtual application delivery control-ler that is tightly coupled with Cisco’s virtual networking framework.
Unlike other ADCs, Citrix NetScaler 1000V integrates with the Cisco Nexus 1100 Cloud Services Platform and vPath service insertion architecture, providing plug-and-play installation, improved agility and higher reliance, and giving customers the ability to leverage both their switching and ADC in-vestments. NetScaler 1000V can be deployed anywhere in the data center on demand, making it possible to more effectively inte-grate networking services with application delivery.
“NetScaler 1000V links infrastructure and applications and provides their con-fi guration information to the Cisco APIC,” McCandless said. “The APIC automates net-work provisioning and control based upon application requirements and policies defi ned by Cisco ACI. Together these technologies provide unifi ed control over Layer 2 to Layer 7 services.”
Businesses depend upon faster applica-tion rollouts and changes, yet IT often strug-gles to keep pace due to the complexity of network infrastructure. Citrix and Cisco of-fer a tightly integrated portfolio of solutions that couple load balancing and other poli-cy-based services with automated
provision-ing and control of network resources. ©2014 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. CIT-51
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T departments are evolving from technology caretakers to IT service providers in order to ensure that users have the business services and applications they need. However, in-creasingly complex enterprise networks have made management equally com-plex, which forces IT departments to revert to caretaking mode. At the same time, large volumes of data are straining network bandwidth and storage capac-ity.Software-defi ned networking (SDN) promises to overcome these obstacles. SDN separates control from individual switches and routers, which previous-ly had to be confi gured based on ven-dor-specifi c protocols — a time-con-suming, resource-intensive process. With SDN, IT can centrally control traffi c and manage how applications and services are delivered by programming all phys-ical and virtual devices through a single SDN controller.
SDN makes management much
more effi cient and improves scalability, providing the fl exibility to add band-width and devices on demand. Because network resources are automatically provisioned and allocated based upon current business needs, SDN makes it easier to deal with unpredictable net-work demands without disruption to operations.
Although forecasts for the SDN market vary considerably, all point to considerable interest in SDN. Accord-ing to Dell’Oro Group, the SDN mar-ket is estimated to grow 65 percent to $3 billion in 2014. Estimates from other researchers forecast the SDN market to fall somewhere between $18 billion and $35 billion in 2018.
“SDN is taking center stage among innovative approaches to some of the networking challenges brought about by the rise of the 3rd Platform, partic-ularly virtualization and cloud comput-ing,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure at IDC. “With
SDN’s growing traction in the data cen-ter for cloud deployments, encen-terprise IT is beginning to see the value in potential-ly extending SDN to the WAN and into the campus to meet the demand for more agile approaches to network architec-ture, provisioning and operations.”
Challenges Ahead
One factor working in SDN’s fa-vor has been the push for open-source standards. Open-source standards make the design and operation of SDN sim-pler and more fl exible, while preventing organizations from being tied to ven-dor-specifi c devices, software and proto-cols. The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profi t organization that supports open SDN, introduced Open-Flow, which is widely regarded as the fi rst SDN-specifi c standard. OpenFlow enables communication between the central controller and network switch-es, ensuring compatibility and support without vendor lock-in.
“In 2015, I predict that open-source software will be recognized as not only a legitimate but the desirable route to net-work standards,” said ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt. “Vendors will look to open-source software as a way to re-duce development expenses on things that don’t meaningfully differentiate products. Network operators will begin adopting open-source software direct-ly or indirectdirect-ly, or by starting a project themselves and sharing with the commu-nity to further develop it.”
Of course, the initial hype surround-ing SDN has blinded many to the ob-stacles preventing organizations from transitioning to SDN. While open-source standards such as OpenFlow are a step in the right direction, more standards are needed.
Legacy infrastructure can also be problematic if it isn’t highly virtualized and doesn’t support SDN protocols. Al-though technology vendors have indicat-ed that some organizations have already moved from the exploratory phase to implementation, it may make sense for organizations to wait for their next net-work refresh to consider SDN.
The Future of SDN
Although software-defi ned networking is gaining traction,
work needs to be done before it can go mainstream.
Cutting through Confusion
Two concepts that are very similar to SDN have created confusion in the marketplace. The fi rst is network vir-tualization, which has been deployed by enterprises for more than a decade. Network virtualization establishes logi-cal, virtual networks by segmenting the existing network at the fl ow level and connecting each domain virtually rath-er than physically. Because these virtual networks are separated from network hardware, it becomes easier to move vir-tual machines without reconfi guring the network.
The second concept is network functions virtualization (NVF), which is designed to virtualize network func-tions and services that now require
proprietary hardware. By running these functions and services in software, or-ganizations can consolidate networking components such as routers, fi rewalls and load balancers and host them in vir-tual machines. NVF is primarily used at this point by service providers and tele-com carriers, not enterprises.
“While much progress is being made across the NFV ecosystem, we think it will be several more years before large-scale implementations of NFV occur,” said Dell’Oro Group Vice President Shin Umeda.
Although security and compliance can be managed more effectively in the long-term, SDN presents short-term se-curity concerns that have given organi-zations pause. Software-defi ned security
applications are still maturing, and the centralization of control in SDN creates a single point of vulnerability. This can dramatically increase the impact of a breach.
The business benefi ts are clear and SDN deployments have begun. However, the transition to SDN on a larger scale is likely to take several years. Collabo-ration between vendors and industry leaders must continue in order to de-velop standards and best practices that will simplify SDN architecture and keep networks secure. In the meantime, CIOs need to get up to speed on SDN now be-cause a completely different model for network management will be required if organizations hope to remain competi-tive.
A
number of open protocols have emerged to en-able communication between a centralized con-troller and network devices in a software-defi ned networking (SDN) environment. Perhaps the best known is OpenFlow, which separates the network control plane from the data plane to allow all network devices to be con-fi gured and managed through the central controller.But OpenFlow is only one such protocol. Building upon the vision of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) in the data center, Cisco and industry leaders have intro-duced a new open, standards-based protocol called Op-Flex. OpFlex takes a somewhat different approach than OpenFlow, centralizing only policy control and allowing traditional distributed network protocols to do the rest. It is designed to address the scalability challenges presented by a fully centralized architecture yet provides an extensi-ble protocol that supports a wide range of devices.
Coauthored by Citrix, IBM, Microsoft and Sungard Availability Services, OpFlex provides a unique mechanism that enables a network controller to transfer abstract poli-cy to a set of “smart” devices capable of directly rendering rich network policy on the device. Through Cisco’s Appli-cation Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and OpFlex, customers will be able to deploy and manage applications at scale with full policy enforcement in multi-data center environments through policy federation.
As a longstanding participant in the open source com-munity, Cisco is driving the growth of open source tech-nologies, expanding the development of open standards and investing resources to provide sustainable innovation. Along with its coauthors, Cisco plans to help standard-ize OpFlex through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and provide open source implementations to accel-erate support within the broader ecosystem, including such widely adopted open source-based solutions as OpenStack.
By opening the APIC application policy to a variety of infrastructure providers through the OpFlex protocol, Cisco is allowing customers to simplify the automation and management of multivendor networks. OpFlex will enable leading hypervisors, switches and network services (Layer 4 to Layer 7) to self-confi gure driven by application policy. Those adopting OpFlex include leading hypervisor and software vendors that jointly support OpFlex-enabled vir-tual switches and extend the Cisco ACI policy framework in their virtual environments. Network services vendors will be shipping an OpFlex agent with their appliances.
In addition, Cisco is working with OpenDaylight to create a 100-percent open source, ACI-compatible policy model and OpFlex reference architecture. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, OpenDaylight is a collaborative, open-source initiative developed to promote more widespread use of SDN, reduce risk and support innovation.
OpFlex Protocol Offers Open, Multivendor, Standards-based
Networks for the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure
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rganizations operate in a dynamic business environment that de-mands fast response to changing business needs, fast deployment of new appli-cations and fast rollout of new ser-vices. Users expect high performance and availability regardless of their lo-cation or the device they’re using.To meet these demands, the data center is evolving to a private cloud model that provides greater fl exibility, agility and scalability while reducing costs. A private cloud enables organi-zations to focus less on management and maintenance of infrastructure and more on the delivery of services. Re-sources are centrally controlled and automatically allocated according to policies, allowing IT to quickly deploy the tools users need, such as a new ap-plication, service or mobile device.
Getting there isn’t easy, howev-er. A 2013 study conducted by IDG Connect on behalf of Red Hat found that internal development of private clouds left organizations with a host of challenges to address. Resource management was the primary chal-lenge (cited by 21 percent of respon-dents), followed by IT management complexity, application management and application migration (each cited by 18 percent of respondents).
These issues are leading enterpris-es to adopt OpenStack, an open-source cloud software platform that controls large, scalable pools of compute, stor-age and networking resources. An overwhelming 84 percent of survey re-spondents said that OpenStack is part of their future cloud plans, and 60 percent indicated that they are already working on OpenStack deployments.
“The survey fi ndings offer a clear indication that OpenStack is quick-ly becoming a reality for many IT organizations, and can serve as a vi-able cloud infrastructure backbone for private cloud,” said Radhesh Bal-akrishnan, general manager, Virtual-ization, Red Hat. “The survey shows that business leaders understand that OpenStack can bring improved visibil-ity, speed, fl exibility and agility to the private cloud.”
What Is OpenStack?
OpenStack provides a set of soft-ware tools for building and managing public and private clouds. It enables users to deploy virtual machines and other resources on the fl y, providing the horizontal scalability that is a hallmark of cloud platforms. These resources are centrally managed and can be provisioned by users through an online interface, reducing manage-ment overhead. Managemanage-ment visibility is a key benefi t of OpenStack, cited by
73 percent of respondents to the Red Hat/IDG survey.
Another major advantage of OpenStack is platform fl exibility, cit-ed by 69 percent of survey respon-dents. Different systems are available for private, public and hybrid clouds, all of which can be highly customized according to business needs thanks to the open-source nature of the system.
OpenStack also provides great-er agility, regardless of the type of cloud platform being used. This en-ables organizations to quickly and easily deploy their cloud systems, in-troduce new services and respond to changing market conditions. Survey respondents cited deployment speed (72 percent), agility (69 percent) and competitive advantage (67 percent) as benefi ts that separate OpenStack from other private cloud alternatives.
Like other open-source initiatives, OpenStack is also a global community of developers and technologists who collaborate to create, improve and support open-source cloud
infrastruc-The Open-Source Cloud
OpenStack promises to speed private cloud deployments
and provide greater fl exibility, agility and choice.
ture solutions. The goal of OpenStack is to make it easy for any organization to leverage the cloud on standard hardware and eliminate the limitations of vendor lock-in. Because there is no vendor lock-in, users have the freedom to evaluate more services and tools from more vendors.
OpenStack encourages experimentation and the development of new functionality and features. This do-it-yourself mentality leads to the availability of more plugins and tools that can overcome defi ciencies and enhance existing services, benefi ting the Open-Stack community as a whole.
A New Language
OpenStack comprises a number of components, nine of which are distributed as part of any Stack system. These include Nova (also called Open-Stack Compute), which enables the deployment of management of large numbers of virtual machines on demand; Swift, an object and fi le storage system; and Neutron (formerly called Quantum), a cloud control-ler and software-defi ned networking project. Hori-zon, OpenStack’s graphical user interface, enables de-velopers to access all of the OpenStack components and provides system administrators with a dashboard view of the cloud as well as management tools.
Those who use OpenStack will need to learn an entirely new terminology. For example, a virtual ma-chine deployed in the cloud is called an “instance,” and “fl avor” refers to hardware related to a particular instance. Because OpenStack has its own language, it can be diffi cult to understand and complicated to deploy.
According to the Red Hat/IDG survey, the top challenges to OpenStack adoption include IT staff skill gaps (32 percent) and questions about where to start (10 percent). Survey respondents believe Open-Stack vendors and system integrators are best posi-tioned to provide expertise and help justify invest-ments.
A number of vendors have jumped on the Open-Stack bandwagon, including Red Hat, IBM, HP and Cisco. 451 Research expects the OpenStack market to grow from $883 million in 2014 to $3.3 billion in 2018, with a signifi cant uptick in revenue from the OpenStack products, distributions and management space.
“OpenStack has seen tremendous growth over the last four years in terms of investment and community expansion,” said Al Sadowski, Research Director for 451 Research’s Service Provider channel. “The open-source platform is increasingly a consideration for private cloud deployments, and the business models within the ecosystem continue to evolve.”
Rackspace Offers
OpenStack-Powered
Private Cloud
R
ackspace recently released its Rackspace Private Cloud offering powered by OpenStack, a man-aged Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering designed to run enterprise production workloads. The offering is based upon the ninth release of OpenStack, code-named Icehouse, which became available in April. It is built and operated by the company that co-founded OpenStack, is a top contributor to OpenStack and now runs one of the world’s largest OpenStack-powered clouds.Rackspace Private Cloud includes a 99.99 percent OpenStack API uptime guarantee, is designed to scale to hundreds of nodes, and delivers high availability with con-sistent performance. It deploys OpenStack services using Linux containers, which allows customers to independent-ly scale each service and provides the ability to perform seamless, in-place upgrades from one release to another.
Unlocking the full power of the cloud requires auto-mation. Rackspace DevOps Automation Services help cus-tomers automate their processes for deploying and scaling applications by treating their infrastructure as code. In addition, Rackspace Private Cloud supports OpenStack Orchestration (Heat), which helps customers automate the provisioning of infrastructure, services and applications.
The Rackspace Private Cloud delivers the agility and effi ciency of a public cloud combined with the enhanced security, control and performance of a dedicated environ-ment. Customers can deploy Rackspace Private Cloud in their data center, at Rackspace or in both locations. Cus-tomers also have the ability to burst into the public cloud by using RackConnect to securely connect their Rackspace Private Cloud with the Rackspace Public Cloud.
“Rackspace Private Cloud was designed to deliver sta-ble, API-driven OpenStack infrastructure so that our cus-tomers can focus on the development of business-critical, revenue-generating applications,” said Darrin Hanson, vice president, Rackspace Private Cloud. “Rackspace’s exper-tise in operating OpenStack clouds allows our customers to take advantage of a private cloud without investing in house operational expertise. With the addition of an in-dustry leading guarantee and DevOps automation of the application lifecycle, customers can rest assured that Rack-space Private Cloud delivers a production-ready platform that can unlock the full power of cloud technology.”
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