At Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona, Spain, Cisco and Equinix have announced that Equinix has deployed the Cisco Tail-f Network Control System (NCS) as part of the foundational technology powering the Equinix Cloud Exchange – the Equinix Programmable Network. This technology enables the automated network and service provisioning for cloud hosting providers and their enterprise customers.
Tail-f Systems, now part of Cisco, provides cloud service orchestration and network automation solutions based on NETCONF and YANG. Tail-f’s NCS provides multi-vendor, multi-service programmability to the Equinix Programmable Network, the foundation for Equinix Cloud Exchange. This would provide enterprise customers with agility and vendor neutrality that allows for rapid deployment and provisioning of multi-cloud environments.
Many enterprises are pursuing a multi-cloud architecture, in which applications span multiple private and public clouds. Equinix Cloud Exchange, with direct access to leading cloud hosting providers such as AWS, Cisco, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, and others, would enable enterprises to realize their multi-cloud goals.
Equinix Cloud Exchange enables this via its SDN foundation, the Equinix Programmable Network. The combination of Tail-f NCS together with Equinix‘s SDN-based architecture, would enable the enterprise to instantaneously provision new and direct connections to the cloud, something that otherwise could take weeks to achieve.
Speed and Flexibility
“Our goal with the Equinix Cloud Exchange is to provide multi-cloud interconnectivity solutions that satisfy high-performance application needs in a secure environment,” said Ihab Tarazi, chief technology officer, Equinix. “Tail-f NCS is a key part of our foundational programmable network and allows us to provide multi-cloud services in an agile and vendor-neutral way. Tail-f’s support for YANG also allows us to quickly define new services without the burden of vendor-specific configuration protocols.”
Equinix Cloud Exchange is currently available in 19 markets – Amsterdam, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Osaka, Paris, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto and Washington, D.C. – with additional expansions planned for Melbourne and Zurich in early 2015.
“We have worked intensely with Equinix over the past six months to develop a foundational architecture for the Equinix Cloud Exchange,” said Fredrik Lundberg, director, Strategy and Planning, Cisco. “Our model-based orchestration solution, Tail-f NCS, gives Equinix superior speed and flexibility. We are excited to work with Equinix to deliver on the promises of SDN.”
The Tail-f Network Control System (NCS) is transitioning to the Cisco portfolio and will soon be marketed under the name “Cisco Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) enabled by Tail-f.”
