Cisco Accelerates Greater Adoption of Network Programmability

Cisco Accelerates Greater Adoption of Network Programmability Donates Tail-fs Leading Management Agent Software to the Industry

SAN JOSE, Calif. - February 18, 2015 - Cisco today announced the contribution of Basic ConfD, a free version of its powerful ConfD management agent software, to accelerate the adoption of programmability for the broader networking industry. Tail-f, now part of Cisco, provides two products, ConfD and NCS. NCS, a multi-vendor network service orchestrator for traditional and virtualized networks is transitioning to the Cisco portfolio and will be marketed under the name Cisco Network Service Orchestrator enabled by Tail-f.

By implementing an end-to-end programmable network based on open standards, service providers can reduce configuration and management costs by nearly 50 percent over a five-year period, while having the agility to easily add new services. Todays announcement about the future of Tail-f ConfD, demonstrates Ciscos commitment to advancing open standards in the best interest of the networking industry.

ConfD is a mature, proven management agent framework with a rich set of APIs for developers of physical and virtual networking devices. Currently in use by more than 75 network equipment providers, ConfD provides the industry-leading implementation of the NETCONF protocol driven by the YANG data modeling language. The no-cost Basic ConfD is feature-rich and will be available for production use without additional fees for NETCONF. The premium version of ConfD, including a complete set of north-bound interfaces including CLI, REST and SNMP, continues to be commercially available.

We continue to see strong demand from networking vendors, as they sharply ramp up their efforts to provide standardized programmatic interfaces to their virtual or physical network devices, said Fredrik Lundberg, director of strategy and planning, Ciscos cloud and virtualization group. ConfD dramatically reduces the time and resources needed to develop network management interfaces. Networking vendors leverage Basic ConfD to rapidly develop products that are fully NETCONF- and YANG-compliant.

Basic ConfD is available now and can be downloaded from the Tail-f website. The software is made available with an unlimited, perpetual license.

Supporting Quotes:

Caroline Chappell, Principal Analyst, NFV and Cloud at Heavy Reading

Configuration and fault management end up costing up to 45 percent of the total cost of ownership for networking devices over a five-year period. At least half these costs would go away if all networking elements adopted a standardized transactional protocol such as NETCONF and its corresponding modeling language of YANG.

Jeff Finkelstein, Director of Network Architecture, Cox Communications

As we increase the number of services provided by cable MSOs over our networks, we want to reduce the complexity of the service enablement, fulfillment, management and operational ecosystem. With NETCONF as the management protocol and YANG as the modeling language, we may now have the building blocks to create scalable and maintainable catalogs using elastic and programmatic network elements, without needing to significantly increase investments in legacy BSS and OSS systems.

Ihab Tarazi, Chief Technology Officer, Equinix

Tail-fs implementation of NETCONF and YANG is a fundamental enabler of Equinixs ability to drive network and service agility for cloud providers and their enterprise customers. Making Basic ConfD freely available will accelerate market adoption and realization of the benefits of NETCONF and YANG, paving the way for us to develop and our customers to more easily integrate highly-advanced services and solutions based on the two.

Supporting Resources

Blog Post

ConfD product page

ConfD video

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