Heavy Networking 678: How Cisco Accelerates The IP/Optical Automation Journey (Sponsored)

Welcome to Heavy Networking. Today we head into the deep, dark data center of the service provider, where we learn how they are standing up global virtual network slices for their customers. You might think, “Oh, like an MPLS VPN? We’ve had those forever. So what’s the big deal?” Not exactly. In the modern networking era, we’re talking about service providers software defining a network slice using traffic engineering, unifying that slice across multiple network operators, and then presenting that virtual network slice as a programmable entity to the customer. That’s a bit more than what an MPLS VPN can offer, at least by itself as we’d traditionally think of it. Our sponsor today is Cisco Systems, and our guest is Moty Cohen. Moty is a Product Manager from the Sedona Systems line of business within Cisco, better known as Crosswork Hierarchical Controller. He’s here to talk us through the frameworks commonly used to tackle these network slicing and traffic engineering challenges, their pros and cons, and then the approach he’s seeing his customers adopt as they create virtual networking products for their customers. Show Links: Crosswork Hierarchical Controller – Cisco Systems Abstraction and Control of Transport Networks (actn) – IETF Transport API Project (TAPI) – Open Networking Foundation Cisco completes acquisition of Sedona Systems – Cisco