For those that didn’t hear, Cisco announced their Cloud Services Router at Cisco Live this year in San Diego. They didn’t put much emphasis on it at all and if you weren’t paying attention, you would have missed it completely. The last I heard, it was scheduled for GA towards the end of 2012 but there are some pre-release versions available if you want to get your feet wet.
So what it is? Basically, it’s an IOS-XE router running on a VM in your cloud environment. That’s the bottom line. That alone should generate lots of grand thoughts about possible use cases for those that have been involved in deploying large SP cloud environments. There is a lot of potential here for the SP and cloud provider markets in general and I was surprised by how little attention this got at Cisco Live.
Having the ability to set up a VM in your cloud environment as the gateway for that environment has a lot of potential for an SP cloud offering. Think about it for a minute. How are you bringing customer connectivity into your cloud environment today? You might be terminating MPLS VRFs at the provider edge and then extending VLANs into the customer cloud environments or you might be terminating VPN services at a VPN gateway somewhere upstream of their cloud and then extending the environment back from that device.
CSR opens up the opportunity to have end-to-end customer connectivity all the way to the customers cloud environment. It will be able to serve as the MPLS or VPN gateway for your cloud environments without the need for additional specialized upstream gear to handle these functions. You’ll be able to do full L2 over WAN connectivity from your customer’s sites/data centers to your IaaS infrastructure. This could be huge for the SP market who is still struggling to figure out all the various connectivity models to get to their customers outside of the facilities hosting their cloud pods. The simple fact of being able to move the VRF termination to the cloud edge eliminates having to use VLANs from the provider edge to the cloud edge, which can be a very big challenge in a lot of SP designs.
CSR will support the protocols you are probably running in your network now (OSPF, BGP, etc.) and CSR will also function as a LISP tunnel router, allowing layer 3 address mobility between your cloud environments in different data centers.
On top of all that, there appears to be some kind of firewall capabilities that will be more than just the standard router ACLs. Depending on the extent of what gets released, this could function as your cloud customer’s perimeter gateway or at least offer another layer of firewall services for added security (perhaps use it in combination with ASA1000v?)
It should be very interesting to see this when the final version makes it to market. I’m looking forward to seeing how it will impact some of our SP architectures moving forward.
