Glossary

Terms

Description

BIOS

BIOS is firmware used to perform hardware initialization during the booting process, and to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs. The BIOS firmware comes pre-installed on a personal computer's system board, and it is the first software to run when powered on.

Cisco IMC

The Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC) is the management service for the C-Series servers. CIMC runs within the server. You can use a web-based GUI or SSH-based CLI to access, configure, administer, and monitor the server.

DPDK

The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is a set of data plane libraries and network interface controller drivers for fast packet processing.

DTLS

Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) is a communications protocol that provides security for datagram-based applications by allowing them to communicate in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery.

IPSec

Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts the packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network

LACP

Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) is a protocol for the collective handling of multiple physical ports that can be seen as a single channel for network traffic purposes.

LLDP

Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) is a vendor independent link layer protocol used by network devices for advertising their identity, capabilities to neighbors on a LAN segment.

MIB

Management Information Base (MIB) is a database of the objects that can be managed on a device. The managed objects, or variables, can be set or read to provide information on the network devices and interfaces.

NETCONF

A Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) is a protocol defined by the IETF to install, edit, and delete the configuration of network devices.

NGIO

Next Generation Input/Output (NGIO)

PnP

Plug and Play (PnP) increases speed and reduces complexity of device deployments.

Port Channels

Port channels combine individual links into a group to create a single logical link that provides the aggregate bandwidth of up to eight physical links.

RADIUS

Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) is a networking protocol, operating on port 1812 that provides centralized Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting management for users who connect and use a network service.

REST API

Representational state transfer (REST) suggests to create an object of the data requested by the client and send the values of the object in response to the user.

Service Chaining

Service chaining allows data traffic to be rerouted through one or more services, such as firewall, load balancer, and intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) devices.

SNMP

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a framework used for managing devices on the internet. It provides a set of operations for monitoring and managing the internet.

SPAN

Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) feature, which is sometimes called port mirroring or port monitoring, selects network traffic for analysis by a network analyzer.

Spanning Tree

Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is a Layer 2 protocol that runs on bridges and switches. The main purpose of STP is to ensure that you do not create loops when you have redundant paths in your network.

SR-IOV

Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) allows multipleVMs running a variety of guest operating systems to share a single PCIe network adapter within a host server. SR-IOV allows a VM to move data directly to and from the network adapter, bypassing the hypervisor for increased network throughput and lower server CPU burden.

TACACS

Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System (TACACS) refers to a family of related protocols handling remote authentication and related services for networked access control through a centralized server.

UEFI

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware.

virtio

Virtual input/output (virtio) is a virtualization standard for network and disk device drivers where just the guest's device driver "knows" it is running in a virtual environment, and cooperates with the hypervisor.

VM

A virtual machine (VM) is an emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardware, software, or a combination.

VNF

Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), the software version of network appliances such as a router, firewall, load-balancer etc