Need Info about AON Blade

[dshakya]

Please someone tell me What exactly AON Blade does?In what type of network it is useful?

I have gone through some documents saying suitable for Application oriented network.

AON acts as policy enforcement point on network. I am not getting these high figh terminology.

Someone can plz tell me in simplified manner.

[andrew.burns]

Hi,

AON can be hard to understand if you've never been involved in large-scale distributed application development but in simple terms what you are doing is putting some of your application into the network, rather than having all of the application in the clients and servers, for example.

There are so many possibilities that it's best described by looking at some of the case studies:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6480/prod_brochure_list.html

What is router does is look at the IP address and make a forwarding decision based on that (usually..) but what AON does is look inside a message and make an intelligent decision based on the message content.

HTH

Andrew.

[dshakya]

Thanx Andrew !!

I would like to know if you have some idea....how IPC will work between AON Blade and Linux/Solaris machine.Is thr something in AON Blade that IPC can leverage on it to communicate with Linux OS?

[dshakya]

Hi,

Please tell me if have some idea that which algorithm being used in Cat4k for "service-compress-config"?

[andrew.burns]

Hi,

Not sure how this is related to AON ;-) but I believe it's based on the unix compress command i.e. adaptive Lempel-Ziv (sometimes referred to as Lempel-Ziv-Welch or LZW).

HTH

Andrew.

[andrew.burns]

Hi,

Details of the API's are in the programming guide:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6480/products_programming_reference_guides_list.html

But, bear in mind that to enable AON technology in your network, you also need to use the following tools:

1) Cisco AON Development Studio (ADS) Windows-based tool for configuring how application messages are handled at runtime.

2) Cisco AON Management Console (AMC) Linux and web-based server for managing an AON network. AMC synchronizes and processes input from all ADS systems on your network to ensure consistent, up-to-date configurations across all AON-enabled switches and routers.

Don't underestimate the complexity of AON!

HTH

Andrew.

[clachoi]

AON does so many things and it fits in many solutions. It is XML/SOAP feature heavy along, like message level encrypt/decrypt, caching, database dip, XML validation, all base on specific content within the XML. It is gear toward SOA type of application network. So if you have Websphere, AXIS, WebLogic implemented in your application architecture using SOAP/XML, you might want to consider using AON to help with some of the processing right inside your network.

Other things AON does is Queue base messaging, AON can communicate/operate Message Queues from WebsphereMQ, TibcoEMS(via JMS).

There are many articles written about AON from various webserivces website that gives similar explanation.

Here is a link to a video demo:

http://www.siliconvalleysleuth.com/2005/06/how_does_ciscos.html

[santoshmaskar]

Application-Oriented Networking enables the network to capture and analyze inter-application messages and then apply services that enables application infrastructure optimization and security, as well as enabling business activity monitoring and compliance to be enacted within the network. To enable this interaction, AON intercepts application messages as they cross the network and reconstructs them to inspect the content and context of the message.

AON Blade is a hardware which sits inside the router/firewall (catalyst series). Andrew already explained AON component in his previous thread. There are three main components in AON ? 1) ADS 2) AMC and 3) AON Blade.

ADS ? where you can create a policy (Set of rule) which get deployed on AON using AMC

AMC- AON management console where you can create a profile which will be used in ADS while creating a Policy (for Eg. LDAP configuration, Encryption?)

AON Blade- Actual H/W which will execute policy when there are inbound/outbound request and depending upon you policy execution plan it will get executed.

Thanks

Santosh Maskar