Cisco is seeking several pivotal roles in 5G. It is stopping short of going head-to-head with the base station giants in the RAN (though an acquisition of one of the O-RAN start-ups is surely quite likely). But it is locking horns with Nokia and Ericsson in several other significant 5G areas, and of course, is the obvious keystone for the USA’s attempt to build a homegrown 5G supply chain to counter Huawei.
Areas where Cisco will worry the traditional mobile vendors more than it has in the past include the core, transport and orchestration domains. In the core, it made limited headway with a RAN-neutral EPC based on its acquisition of Starent. But in 5G, the evolution of that platform, into a fully cloud-native offering, is scoring some early points.
In its heartland of switches and routers, it has traditionally been in the reverse position, holding court while Alcatel-Lucent and others bit at its heels. In the 5G era, it is Nokia which has built on an acquisition to strengthen its challenge, extending the ALU core router portfolio and developing the FP4 processor, with such success that it appears to be the only credible alternative to Cisco for very high end 5G applications or for webscalers.
And then there is orchestration and end-to-end automation, potentially the most strategic bet of all for Cisco and its best chance to become incumbent with some 5G operators in the software-defined networking (SDN) world. Last week, the company announced the fifth generation of its SDN fabric, ACI (application-centric infrastructure), which supports automation and orchestration across the 5G and transport networks, the edge cloud and the data centers.
End-to-end automation is becoming more complex and more critical, as operators not only migrate to virtualized and SDN-enabled 5G platforms, but also distribute RAN, core and IT workloads and processing, away from centralized locations and towards the edge.
Srini Kotamraju, senior director of product management in Cisco’s data center business group, explained: “They don’t want siloed solutions across the different domains that they manage, and they definitely don’t want to stitch the data center to the provider edge. So it’s the automation function and it’s the visibility end-to-end that they need in a single place.”
ACI 5.0 supports segment routing on MPLS and Ethernet VPN hand-offs to interconnect operators’ 5G transport networks. It also enables automated mapping of thousands of 5G application and transport slices. Another new functionality is that the ACI Multisite Orchestrator can now be automated from a single point across central, regional, and edge data centers.
The new release supports the Amazon AWS Transit Gateway, in order to automate interconnection between multiple AWS virtual private clouds (VPCs), and Cisco plans to add similar support for Microsoft Azure. These steps follow the extension of ACI into AWS and Azure public clouds in early 2019, but other clouds, such as Google and IBM, will not follow until late 2020 or early 2021.
For multi-cloud environments, ACI 5.0 supports segmentation, multi-tenancy, Layer 4 and Layer 7 service automation, including third party firewalls, and automation for high performance interconnect between AWS VPCs and Azure virtual networks.
Finally, the latest release provides upgrades for containerized workloads, including support for the ACI Container Network Interface (CNI) with OpenShift 4.3 on OpenStack and AWS, and Docker Enterprise Release 3.
Two large service providers in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region have been using ACI 5.0 on a trial basis, Kotamraju said.