Cisco announced their intent to acquire Embrane last week. Since they did it on April 1st, there was an initial thought that it might be a prank. But given that Cisco doesn’t really do April Fools jokes, it was quickly determined to be the real deal. More importantly, the Embrane acquistion plugs a very important hole in ACI that I have been worried about for a while.

Everybody Play Nice

Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a great idea that works on the principle that Cisco can get multiple disparate systems to work together to “program” the underlying network to rapidly deploy applications and create policies that allow systems to be provisioned and reconfigured with a minimum of effort.

That’s a great idea in theory. And if you’re only working with Cisco gear it’s any easy thing to pull off. Provided you can easily integrate the ASA operating system with IOS and NX-OS. That’s not an easy chore and all those business units work for the same company. Can you imagine how hard it would be to integrate with an external third party? Even one that is friendly to Cisco? What about a company that only implements the bare minimum functionality to make ACI operational?

ACI is predicated on the idea that all the systems in the network are going to work together to accomplish the goal of policy programming. That starts falling apart when systems are difficult to integrate or refuse to be a part of ACI. Sure, you could program around them. It wouldn’t take much to do an end run around an unruly switch or router. But what about a firewall or load balancer?

Those devices are more important to security and scalability of an application. You can’t just cut them out. You may even have regulations that require you to include them inline with the application. That means headaches if you are forced to work with something that won’t completely integrate.

Bring Your Own Toys

Enter Embrane. Embrane’s helios platform gives Cisco a stable of software firewalls and load balancers that can be spun up and deployed as needed on-demand. That means that unruly hardware can be bypassed when necessary. If your firewall doesn’t like ACI or won’t implement the shims needed to make them play nice, all you need to do is spin up an Embrane firewall. Since Embrane was integrating with ACI even before the acquistion, you know that everything is going to work just fine.

You can also use the Embrane Elastic Services Manager (ESM) to help manage those devices and reclaim them as needed. That sounds like a no-brainer, but if you ever find yourself booting a virtual system on a cluster that has charge-back enabled, or worse booting it on a public cloud provider and forgetting about it, you’ll find that using a lifecycle manager to avoid hundreds or thousands of dollars in charges is a great idea. ESM can also help you figure out how utilized your devices are and gives your a roadmap to add capacity when it’s needed. That way you never have to answer a phone call complaining the new application is running “slow”.

Tom’s Take

Embrane’s acquisition makes all the sense in the world. Cisco had put up a stake in the company in their last funding round. That could be seen as an initial investment to keep Embrane working down the ACI path instead of moving off onto other ideas. Now, Cisco makes good on that investment by bringing the Embrane team back in house, for a while at least. Cisco gets a braintrust that knows how to make on-demand SDN work.

It’s no shock that Embrane is going to be rolled into the INSBU that houses Insieme. These two teams are going to be working together very closely in the coming months to push the Embrane technology into the core of ACI and provide it as an offering to get potential customers off the fence and into the solution. More options for configuring policy based networks is always a great carrot for customers. Overcoming objections about incompatible hardware makes selling the software of ACI a no brainer.