Cisco and industry leaders adopt new protocol – OpFlex

Building on its vision of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) in the data center, Cisco and industry leaders continued the transformation of information technology (IT) with the adoption of a new open, standards-based protocol called OpFlex. Through OpFlex, Cisco ACI continues to deliver the standards-based building blocks for next-generation networks while accelerating innovation with multiple industry leaders.

ACI is the first data center and cloud solution to offer full visibility and integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources, accelerating application deployment through a dynamic, application-aware network policy model. ACI’s policy-based approach will be extended to a growing vendor ecosystem, allowing customers to leverage application-aware policies across multiple hypervisors, physical switches, and network services to protect their existing data center investments.

Cisco plans to help standardize OpFlex through the IETF and provide open-source implementations to accelerate support within the broader ecosystem, including such widely adopted open-source-based solutions as OpenStack.

Customers understand that Cisco ACI and OpFlex solve pressing problems in their data centers today. To drive business agility and efficient use of resources, IT administrators must be able to deploy applications rapidly across a broad range of infrastructure while still delivering performance, scalability, security, and visibility across physical and virtual infrastructure.

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) leverages a unique approach to network programmability and management. It uses a centralized, Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to automate and manage physical and virtual data center fabrics. Unlike older SDN controllers, it supplies application policy – not configuration – to network devices, allowing them to self-configure. Its policy focus makes APIC much more extensible to all network devices and simplifies 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.

The Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), the unified point of automation and management for the ACI fabric, policy programming, and health monitoring, supporting any application anywhere.

Application Network Profiles define the requirements of an application and its interdependencies on the underlying infrastructure. The APIC uses these profiles to dynamically provision networking, services, compute storage and security policies, no matter where the application is or how it changes.