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Traditional SDN models today function on the basis of an imperative control model with a centralized controller and distributed network entities that support the lowest common denominator feature set across vendors such as bridges, ports and tunnels.
Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) adopts a declarative management approach. This model abstracts applications, operations and infrastructure providing simplification and agility. By distributing complexity to the edges, it also increases better scalability, and allows for resiliency – i.e. the data forwarding can still continue to happen even if there is no controller.
“We believe this will accelerate multi-vendor innovation in data center and cloud networks to drive operational simplicity, lower costs and increased agility, says Cisco.
Several industry leaders are involved in the standardization process including Microsoft, IBM, Citrix and SunGard Availability Services.
Cisco is working on an open source OpFlex agent implementation that can be embedded in devices to support the OpFlex protocol. This agent will initially be designed for Open vSwitch but will be reusable across platforms.
A number of technology vendors have committed to support OpFlex in their products. These include Microsoft, IBM, F5, Citrix, RedHat, Canonical, Embrane and AVI networks.
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