Cisco Cisco Prime Network Services Controller 3.2 White Paper

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Ability to interconnect many different service appliances to form a virtual data center topology, potentially

using all or a couple of the above data center services; for example:

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Networks that are routed or switched and/or firewalled according to requirements

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Networks connected to the public Internet or to a private network or both

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Networks with/without load balancing and IP services

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Network with/without application networking services

In this paper w

e will refer to this challenge as “network services interconnect,” or NSI. Cisco is known as one of the

few companies that is able to automatically as well as dynamically interconnect all of the above data center service

appliances through a common API, while doing so using best-in-class data center service appliances, both virtual

and physical. This will be detailed in the latest release of Cisco Prime Network Services Controller by Cisco.

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Ability to use a unified data model for all data center resources and its required connections. This resource

management model (like the Flexible Topologies for Dynamically Automated VDCs model describe in this

paper) should allow create, remove, update, and delete (CRUD) operations for all potential virtual data

center topology use cases for the automated cloud hosting facility. This resource management model is the

most important component as it provides the ability to scale, to provide multitenancy, consumption

monitoring, and assurance.

In this paper we will refer to t

his challenge as “Service Resources Management,” or SRM.

Cloud Network Services Appliance Types

The evolution of cloud computing and IaaS created several types of networking devices and appliances

differentiated by their deployment model, scalability, feature sets, and integration capabilities (APIs). Cisco was the

first to develop and innovate around most of those networking services appliance types and continues to heavily

invest in producing all those appliance types and capabilities per customer use cases and requirements.

As Cisco has been implementing customer’s network automation requirements, it has become apparent that there

are three major cloud network services appliance types. Following are the characteristics of those device types:

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Physical form-factor appliances:

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Purpose-built hardware, focused on performance and scale (see Figure 2); for example, Cisco

ASA

5585-x firewall appliances, Cisco Nexus

switches/routers, Cisco IPS appliances, and others

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Purpose-built operating system; for example, Cisco IOS

Software, Nx-OS, and ASA OS

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Support multiple virtual instances of their function; for example, Cisco virtual contexts inside ASA 5500

appliances, virtual routing and forwarding instances inside Cisco Nexus appliances)

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Deployed in-band or out-of-band as needed

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Require dedicated fiber links, dedicated networks, use dedicated bandwidth