A return to the Intelligent Network

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: DV Henkel-Wallace <gumby () henkel-wallace org>
Date: December 3, 2005 8:16:24 PM EST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
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]


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