Ever read about a new technology or product that instantly makes you think -- Wow, just wow! Well that just happened while reading a very interesting announcement from our friends over at Cisco. The announcement describes a unique approach to connecting multiple disperse cloud data centers / infrastructures. (Some refer to this as the InterCloud) Cisco is calling the technique Redundant Arrays of Independent Data centers. The approach uses Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) to extend Layer 2 Ethernet LANs by encapsulating the traffic.
What really jumped out at me was the statement that "the process of setting up OTV involves only five commands and five minutes of time." Compare that to weeks or months of architecture needed for an MPLS or dark fiber interconnect.
If true, this approach could have huge ramifications for the emergence of regional cloud service providers with a cheap and easy way for end customers to tie together multiple cloud providers together in a secure and efficient way. In a nut shell what this means is long haul "live" VM migration. This is big, typically live migrations have been limited to local area networks, this opens up a significant opportunity to move machines across latent distributed geographies. More importantly it potentially lowers the bar so smaller companies now have access to what traditionally has only been limited to the realm of the largest enterprises who could afford the dark fibre required for such a process.
So this next statement is to anyone from Cisco who may be reading this post. Please, oh, please can you hook me up with access to the Cisco Nexus 7000, I would love to explore how we at Enomaly could potentially use it for connecting multiple regional service providers together. You can get in touch with me here.
