[Before you start reading, I need to give a big thanks to Christian Esteve Rothenberg, Research Scientist at CPqD. I asked if he wouldn't mind reading through this post prior to posting to ensure I didn't botch up anything on RouteFlow, and sure enough he immediately helped out and provided great feedback. Christian also provided us with the picture you'll eventually see below and many of the RouteFlow links as well. There was much more information he provided that I'll hope to get out soon too. Thanks again, Christian.]So...let's get to it. Understanding “flow based protocols” and RouteFlow can change the way you think about networking and the protocols we use on daily basis. I’m referring to control plane protocols such as Spanning Tree, OSPF, EIGRP, and BGP. Based on the traction from this blog, I can see many people are searching for answers on what SDN means for the industry and what the future will be for a network engineer, etc. If you are one of those people, first, ready my last post. It’s a quick synopsis of a presentation at ONS that covers some interesting automated tools already available for controller based networks. And second, keep reading here.
I mentioned in my previous post Nick McKeown, uber smart Entrepreneur and Professor at Stanford, gave what I thought was the finest presentation of the week at the Open Networking Summit hosted in Santa Clara this week. As I wait to board my plane back to the East coast, here is a more detailed recap of the presentation and what I took away from it…
Here is a quick summary on what I think worked well, what didn't work, and some thoughts on improving ONS next year. What worked? - Getting everyone together that has an interest in OpenFlow/SDN. It was great to collaborate and talk with like minded individuals even though we, as an industry, are probably still on the incline of the hype cycle.
- Google, Yahoo, etc. Anything these hyper scale companies talk about is damn interesting
- Exhibits – these are great for any conference and will only improve at ONS as more products are further developed and created.
- VC presentation by Lightspeed. Great presentation here and I’m sure it got the wheels spinning for anyone with an entrepreneurial mind since they are still looking to invest and also believe it’s early in the life of SDN.
- Nick McKewon – see my next blog post. This was the best presentation of the week. Wish I could have seen Nick present all day.
- Pragmatic view by mostly all admitting there is still a way to go in this shift to SDN.
- Logistics, overall schedule, multiple projector screens, and the like.
- There were many more presentation that were also intriguing, but those listed above were the ones top of mind right now.
- Overall, extremely glad I had the opportunity to attend ONS 2012.
With just a few minutes to spare until the 5:30 start of the evening event and exhibits, I thought I’d give a really quick summary of Day 1 at the Open Networking Summit 2012. Note there were two tutorial sessions today and I attended the one for engineers.
The first thing you noticed by seeing everyone’s badges/name tags with associated company, and was confirmed by Brandon’s presentation in the first slide, was there was and is a truly broad audience here. There are the obvious participants from the big name manufacturers, but also, there are between 1-3 people from at least 60 “other” companies, which is the category I fall into since I’m the only one representing BlueWater from NY/NJ. I also had the pleasure of sitting next to the sole person from Aruba Networks as well. Not sure what that tells you about their SDN strategy.
The term Software Defined Networking (SDN) has seemingly become main stream in the past several months being one of the hotter topics, if not the hottest, for the blog and twitter communities. But, has it really gone main stream? I’m not so sure. In fact, I’ll say it hasn’t for sure. The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) formed last year is largely made up of hyper scale web companies, “traditional” network companies, some niche network/services providers, new SDN companies focused on developing software and hardware, and Goldman Sachs. But, does it really matter who is on the ONF from an end user’s standpoint? Do Enterprise’s really care that companies are spending the $30,000 or so per year to be part of the ONF? Do they [Enterprises] care that Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are exploring OF/SDN and are on the board of directors? Doubt it. They care about their requirements that need that of some fixin’. 99% of the environments out there do not replicate that of these hyper scale web companies. If anything, they are more represented by that of Goldman Sachs, right? While Goldman is likely still in the early stages of their SDN R&D, they are who I’d like to hear from. Several years ago I was on the SE team at Cisco that supported Goldman. I didn’t support them directly, but a peer of mind did. These guys/gals at GS are smart, really smart, and it’s no surprise GS looks at the network from a business perspective. Should they realize the benefit of SDN, it’ll be adopted. If they adopt, others will follow, especially those on Wall Street. Pay attention to them and their ONF efforts. But….as a week full of SDN will be starting shortly, here are some other thoughts relating to the topic of SDN. Many of which could be controversial =).
I’ve started thinking about the SDN ecosystem and realized there are A LOT of companies making announcements, but really, who is doing what, how do they all fit together, and what products can be purchased today? That’s what I’m hoping to get across in this post.
Before I get started, I’ll say upfront, for some of the companies in the ecosystem, they have clear and concise messaging – exactly what they are working on and what they have planned, which is great for all of us. However, for a quite a few, I don’t know much (maybe you do) about what they are working on, but they are calling themselves next generation SDN companies. Their websites couldn’t be vaguer, but I guess that’s all we can expect from companies in stealth mode. With that said, feel free to comment if you have further information or corrections to make on anything that you see below.
There are trends of high density 10GbE connectivity in the data center that are increasing the needs for some to use 40GbE interfaces for uplink connectivity. Because 40GbE requires a new type of optic, called a QSFP+, I’ve had many questions from customers and myself regarding the connectivity and cabling options. Oddly enough, it took talking to at least 5 Cisco Engineers that span San Jose to NYC to compile this data, so if you’ve like to correct or add anything here, please feel free to comment below.
The specific questions and research I was doing was related to the Cisco Nexus 3000 series switches, namely the 3064 and 3016. I state that because there is the chance that the QSFP+ could operate differently if using different switch types – and that’s per the TME of optic. For those new to the Nexus 3000 series, the 3064 has 48 front facing ports of SFP+ (1G/10G) and 4 x 40GbE QSFP+ that could be used as uplinks. The 3016 has 16 40GbE QSFP+ ports.
First, I’ll say in advance that this post probably won’t be one of my best…if the flow seems off, it is because it was pieced together over the past few weeks from various email and general conversations I’ve had regarding SDN. The main theme here is Think Different (well, I think Steve Jobs said it first). Private/Public/Hybrid cloud is seemingly where 99% of the focus is when it pertains to OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking (SDN) in any article/blog/etc. Personally, I think the industry (at this point it’s just consultants, vendors, and a FEW SDN users) need to think outside the box. As much evangelizing as is going on right now, it’s still the same few that are probably reading into it over and over…that’ my perception anyway. Network Operators still aren’t familiar with these concepts from a high level and it is the average IT organization that can possibly really benefit from SDN. Dimitri said it best – mid-market is forgotten about to a large extent. 100% agree with him and this is where I spend much of my time consulting, so I see it all the time!
Security. It’s an interesting topic when it comes to networking within Enterprise IT. There are those that are truly focused on an end to end view of security or just freakishly enjoy security and then those that are usually okay with just implementing a perimeter FW and maybe an IDS/IPS. So, when it comes to your “typical” Enterprise LAN, all hosts are inherently trusted so communication between clients and servers, clients and clients, and servers and servers, is unprotected. I will say, in 2011, I've seen this starting to change and infrastructure security is becoming even more critical for the average “mid-market” customer for various reasons, but heavily attributed to the wide adoption smart phones, tablets, and the whole “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) mantra being driven by the consumer. Anyway, what does this have to do with OpenFlow/SDN? Nothing…yet, but the question that came to me while I was in a meeting with a NYC based financial firm last week was, “How will security be perceived with running a *real* virtualized network with control plane separation happening at a controller?” Before I go any further, here is some background…
For those that aren’t aware, I was proudly in a fraternity in college and our motto was simple, “Loved, Hated, but Never Ignored,” and we wore it proudly on our fraternity t-shirts. The same motto seems to be true for Software Defined Networks in the industry at this moment. There is a community of folks that see the potential, but not everyone is on board, not everyone thinks it’s for real, some call it hype, some call it a technology for Cloud Providers, and some think that it was built by the academic community and that’s where it will stay for the long term, but you know what, people keep talking about it, and that’s a great thing…because you don’t want to be ignored ;). There have been many blogs, tweets, and announcements in this space with the most recent coming from Nicira.
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