Zenoss partnered with Cisco to provide an integrated network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) system to accelerate SDN deployments in service provider networks.

The jointly-developed Zenoss-Cisco NFVI includes Cisco’s Unified Computing Systems and Nexus switching, the Cisco virtual infrastructure manager (VIM) based on Red Hat OpenStack, and Zenoss’ Service Dynamics (ZSD), which does hybrid IT monitoring.

Apparently, Cisco has been using the Red Hat OpenStack distribution for about a year and a half. Charles Stucki, VP and GM of Cisco’s network functions virtualization business unit, said, “We are committed to helping our service provider customers successfully deploy virtualized network functions. We’re talking about all the telcos; and they are standardizing on OpenStack. Before, we partnered with multiple players, but now we’re more centered on Red Hat,” Stucki said.

He said Cisco uses its expertise with network configurations to make sure that when OpenStack is deployed it is configured in a way that is relevant to a network load. “The innovation we provided is that we didn’t make OpenStack not OpenStack,” Stucki quipped.

In addition, Cisco is working with Docker container technology to automate the install and upgrade of OpenStack. “There’s a lot in OpenStack; it’s complicated,” said Stucki. “We wanted to make it easy to deploy. We’re doing this for smaller service providers and large service providers as well.”

Steve Sigler, a senior director of business development at Zenoss, said of the integrated product, “As Cisco deploys infrastructure for NFVs, we can automatically monitor those resources as you spin up a server. It takes the onus off operations to manually configure, stripping away that complexity.”

The combined product automates the monitoring and provisioning of systems and applications in dynamic NFV environments. And it improves performance and capacity planning to use all computing resources most efficiently at all times.

Cisco’s own Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) runs on its Nexus 9000 Series switches. Stucki said, “ACI can be used in an NFVI deployment. We also have our virtual topology system (VTS) as a multi-vendor controller.”