GigaOm post says it will be vital to company's success in cloud
There’s an interesting post on GigaOm this week on how cloud computing is forcing Cisco to embrace open source. It argues that Cisco realizes open source software will be critical to its success in cloud due to the emphasis on application development.
The post explains how Lew Tucker, CTO of Cisco’s cloud computing division, learned long ago that IT was all about developers, and that he’s now applying that logic to Cisco. An example is Cisco’s participation in OpenStack – an open source cloud computing platform project – and the company’s recent submission of Network as a Service (NaaS) to OpenStack’s existing computing and storage underpinnings.
Both were catalyzed by Tucker, the GigaOm post asserts. NaaS would give OpenStack developers APIs with which to develop applications for creating and managing virtual networks.
Tucker, as you recall, was recruited to Cisco from Sun, where he was leading Sun’s effort to develop a developer’s cloud. So it’s only natural that Tucker would view application development as a foundational element of IT, and of cloud.
Oracle, Sun’s acquirer, had no interest in funding development of a developer’s cloud, according to Tucker.
Cisco’s involvement in OpenStack will help it sell more Cisco hardware, GigaOm posits. Customers are increasingly interested in OpenStack as an “open,” vendor-independent foundation of open-source cloud components that brings along with it an intact ecosystem. And Cisco is already telling and showing people how to run OpenStack on its blade and rackmount Unified Computing System servers.
Indeed, Cisco’s data center rivals are also broadening efforts to get application developers to write programs for their hardware. Brocade this week announced plans to support OpenStack and OpenFlow on its gear – OpenFlow provides access to switch forwarding tables so they can be manipulated by an external controller, making any vendor’s switch or router programmable.
And Arista Networks also this week announced plans to allow developers to write to the Extensible Operating System (EOS) on its switches through an “App Store”-like approach called EOS Central. Arista also unveiled an open-source “model,” called CloudVision, for management and administration of cloud environments from a single point.
Network software vendors like Vyatta, meanwhile, have been pushing open source as a development platform for industry standard x86 hardware for years.
An ecosystem of open source applications and application development like OpenStack and OpenFlow will allow companies save money on software because they won’t have to rely on proprietary cloud environments, GigaOm notes. And hardware vendors that can feed that appetite with platforms tuned for open source should sell more product as a result.
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