[IP] A return to the Intelligent Network
Begin forwarded message:
From: DV Henkel-Wallace <gumby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: December 3, 2005 8:16:24 PM EST
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: A return to the Intelligent Network
Dave, this is likely of interest to you and IP readers. You'd think
that Cisco, of all companies, would understand that there's far more
money to be made by (almost) everyone with the "dumb network" model.
They made all their money at the expense of the "intelligent
networks" folks and now they themselves seem intent on repeating the
downsides of the POTS approach (worse, without POTS's advantages).
Excerpted from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/03/welsh-aon:
Cisco’s AON: Jeeves in a router or a box of evils?
By Tom Welsh
Published Saturday 3rd December 2005 07:25 GMT
At first glance, Cisco’s AON ( (Application Oriented Networking)
looks like a brilliant idea. Essentially, it proposes to suck all
manner of security, administrative, and even business policy
functions into its routers and switches. That looks as if it should
benefit everyone – especially existing and prospective Cisco
customers – and might even grease the wheels for quicker and easier
adoption of SOA.
But it’s by no means clear that the rest of us should uncritically
welcome “putting intelligence into the network”. One of the main
reasons for the Internet’s success has been its profound indifference
to the content of the packets it transports. Compromising on the
hallowed principle of “dumb pipes” could crack open Pandora’s box –
indeed, several boxes.
In Cisco’s words, AON “makes it possible to embed intelligence
capabilities into the network”. ...
At the marketing level, AON really is a work of genius. It presses
every hot button, leaves no fashionable acronym unmentioned, and on
top of all that it promises to align IT with business, and cut costs,
quickly and with little effort. Specifically, it is said to support
Web services, SOA, BPM, and EDA, while supercharging BI, BAM, and
RFID. It also helps companies to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-
Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and BASEL II. It’s fast, secure,
selective, visible, cheap (well, relatively) – and it slices, dices
and rices. What’s not to like?
Of course, the primary beneficiary of AON is meant to be Cisco
itself. Despite its boast that “The Cisco name has become synonymous
with the Internet”, the San Jose giant’s 85 per cent share of the
router market in the late 1990s has dropped to somewhere between half
and two thirds, depending on which segments you look at. Rivals like
Juniper and Alcatel are winning sales and slicing into Cisco’s
dominant position.
So it needs to tap some new markets quickly – preferably glamorous,
lucrative ones with high margins. How better to exploit its mighty
internet presence than by moving up the stack into higher added-
value, higher-margin sales? “You seem to be struggling with those
applications and that security, Ms Customer,” it cries. “I just
happen to have an army of routers and switches standing around – they
will be delighted to help you out for a small consideration”.
The main functions that Cisco sees AON performing are application-
specific routing, enforcing security policies, monitoring and
filtering messages, and boosting performance through load balancing,
cacheing, and compression.
Policies are defined, and custom bladelets and adapters written,
using the Windows-based AON Development Studio (ADS), and everything
is set up and administered from the Linux-based AON Management
Console (AMC). Today there are just two AON network modules, the
2600/2800/3700/3800 Series that slots into routers, and the Catalyst
6500 Series for switches. Each of these has a single processor, a
40MB hard drive, and 512MB or more of RAM, so they are proper little
computers in their own right.[...etc]
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/