As promised, Insieme Networks, officially branded “Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)”, exited stealth on Day 3 of this week’s Cisco Live conference in Orlando. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer, revealed that the one-year-old startup is aiming to take SDN to the next level with an open operating system for the network.

Warrior sidestepped the specifics, but she did mention that the software takes an object-oriented approach to managing data center networks. Rather than focusing on individual components, Insieme’s offering serves as an abstraction layer that gives the user control over all IT resources, including networking equipment, servers, storage and services.

The executive described the solution as a common platform for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure. When complete, it will facilitate the rapid provisioning and placement of resources across these environments, and feature a set of RESTful APIs that give developers control over system-level management functions.

Networking + Software must get easier

 .

Improving administrative control is perhaps one of the biggest obstacles facing the networking industry as virtualization continues to influence infrastructure design.  With the official launch of Insieme, Cisco takes another step towards rethinking the network.  Of course, necessity is the mother of invention.  The whole of the networking industry, as well as providers of every other component in IT’s realm, have been forced to innovate.

The conundrum in improving administrative control is that it demands specialized software that’s flexible enough to integrate agnostically with vendor solutions, both hardware and other software applications.  And while flexibility demonstrates all the promise of intelligent IT, it also adds complexity to the system.

Fortunately the networking sector has the server market as a virtualization case study.  Servers have taken a mind-boggling journey to the world of virtualization, centralizing the management process for IT all the while.  And the scale of server virtualization “will continue to grow,” says Broadcom Vice President of Server and Storage Strategy Greg Scherer.  “In addition, we’re seeing virtual networking.

“What we hope for is easier to use networks and computers,” Scherer goes on, emphasizing the importance of usability for IT administrators.  “My hope is that the management tools keep up with technology. We’re going to see the build out of virtual servers continue, and the advance of virtual networks and virtual overlays to move and interchange workloads seamlessly. SDN plays a huge role that really allows the data plane of switching to be managed in a vendor-independent way,” Scherer concludes.

Insieme: Cisco’s new debutante

.

Though Insieme is intriguing, it would be unlikely to survive on its own as a fresh startup.  Lucky for Insieme, Cisco already has an established market presence. Cisco needs to leverage this, and build a large, multi-vendor application ecosystem to drive adoption if it wants to secure Insieme’s place as the next-generation networking platform for the so-called Internet of Things. The company estimates that the number of connected devices will go up from approximately 10 billion today to roughly 50 billion by 2020, joining a small group of tech giants pushing the Internet of Things message to the mainstream.

Rob Commins, the vice president of marketing at Tegile, explained how this trend is driving enterprises towards the application-centric approach Cisco is hoping to realize with Insieme.

“When you think about all those connections over the internet… that’s gonna drive a lot more traffic, a lot more requirements for storage, and new ways to address that scale of capacity out there,” Commins told NewsDesk host Kristin Feledy in an interview this morning. “Going from 10 to 50 billion connection is gonna drive a lot of requirements for data reduction technologies and agility in the data center.”

Commins actually appeared on this morning’s NewsDesk Show remotely, Skyping in from Cisco Live.  He shares his firsthand perspective on this year’s networking event in the following clip:

photo credit: lrargerich via photopin cc