In Part 1 of this series I outlined two of the more commonly accepted definitions of SDN. In this post I discuss how pure play networking vendors have tried to create solutions and package them as SDN.

Cisco announced onePK, a developer kit for their new Open Network Environment (ONE), which, in turn, they announced at Cisco Live this year. onePK is yet to actually be released as of this post. It essentially is a set of APIs that developers can use to interact with their Cisco gear instead of the Northbound and Southbound APIs that I referred to in Part 1. In the onePK APIs, an Open Flow agent can run in IOS, IOS XR, or NX-OS as speak with an Open Flow controller on the ‘north’ side and the openPK API on the ‘south’ side. As you can surmise, this leaves the Control Plane and the Data Plane still in the Cisco device. The reason for Cisco to do this are quite clear: Cisco feels threatened by SDN’s potential.

The biggest networking news item in 2012 was VMWare’s $1.26 billion acquisition of Nicira. Nicira was, after all, the pioneer of Open Flow and the SDN movement. People began to realize that after a decade of slow progress, networking was finally growing up. It manifested the networking industry’s readiness to keep up with server virtualization. However, that didn’t mean that VMWare started outselling Cisco overnight. Contrary to popular belief, the biggest revolution to hit the networking industry in the past five years is not Software Defined Networking. It is the advent of merchant silicon.

Merchant silicon is the reason why firewalls such as Palo Alto Networks, WAN Optimization Controllers such as Infineta, and data center switches such as Arista can exist. By using off-the-shelf silicon, they can deliver superior value by focusing on software. Pure-play giants like Cisco, who have invested a lot time and money in custom ASICs, are seeing their margins plummet because competitors can offer comparable value for much lower prices. Recently, Alcatel-Lucent outbid Cisco by $100 million to win a network infrastructure refresh project with the 23-campus California State University. Clearly trends like SDN, VM mobility, or DCI are not high priorities for everyone.

The insecurity that Cisco feels from SDN is the reason they want to to remain at the center of the ecosystem. With Cisco onePK, control remains on the Cisco device as Omar Sultan of Cisco describes. Thus, the controller that communicates with an Open Flow agent is quite different than the centralized controller envisioned by the Open Network Foundation (ONF). Cisco will make several announcements of other environments, platforms, and products that are iterative changes in reality to demonstrate that they are playing along. However, they will not release control of their market share by, for example, making a dumb switch running an Open Flow agent, and whose forwarding tables can be manipulated by standards.

In October 2012, Cisco acquired vCider as part of their SDN strategy, specifically to enhance their involvement in OpenStack. Of course, there is also a Cisco spin-off Insieme, now rumored at over 150 employees dedicated to building SDN solutions and platforms from ground up.

Brocade, another pure play networking giant, claimed their November 2012 acquisition of Vyatta was an SDN win. Brent Salisbury agrees. However, as Greg Ferro put it, the products are not SDN today.

In Part 3, I will wrap up this series of posts on vendors who have claimed SDN compliance by  discussing some vendors that focus on Services, such as WAN Optimization, Firewalls, and Load Balancers.