OPENFLOW, SDN, OPEN SOURCE AND BARE METAL SWITCHES Guido Appenzeller (Not representing Anyone) October, 2014
Networking is Changing
CLOSED & PROPRIETARY NETWORKING EQUIPMENT Vertically Integrated Systems Have Changed Little Over the Past 15 Years Feature 1 Feature 2 Provisioning and Management Static, manual configuration Low feature velocity Proprietary Network OS Operating Systems Few API s, only CLI (closed OS) Not externally programmable Proprietary System Hardware Systems Lock-in to a particular vendor Proprietary Silicon System Silicon Slow innovation cycles Expensive, no economies of scale
CONTRAST WITH SERVER EQUIPMENT Open Architecture Choice of Vendors Innovation Velocity Low TCO Network Boot Central Configuration Automated Patch Mgmt Provisioning & Management Network Boot Centralized Configuration & Mgmt Linux Windows VMware KVM Xen Operating System Open or closed source Virtualized or bare metal Many support models Dell HP Super Micro Hardware Systems Fierce competition Branded or white box Intel AMD System Silicon Competition and rapid innovation
EVOLUTION OF SERVER PROVISIONING: 1996-2013 Server provisioning has made huge gains through automation. 1996 2013 Step 1 Step 2 Step 3
EVOLUTION OF NETWORK PROVISIONING: 1996-2013 Network provisioning has not evolved. 1996 2013 Terminal Protocol: Telnet Terminal Protocol: SSH
because the enormous installed base of equipment and protocols, [ ], which have created an exceedingly high barrier to entry for new ideas. [ ] hence the commonly held belief that the network infrastructure has ossified. OpenFlow White Paper, 2008 Stanford computer scientist [ ] developed a standard called OpenFlow [ ]--a sort of "software-defined networking." MIT Technology Review, 2009
(OLD) DEFINITION OF SDN Wikipedia Defini9on: A communications protocol that gives access to the forwarding plane of a network of a switch or router over the network.
SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKING (2009) Actual Slide from 2009
SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKING (2009) SDN Controller Features/Apps Controller Platform SDN Protocol (e.g. OpenFlow) Network OS SDN Client Networking Silicon SDN Enabled Switch SDN Enabled Switch Vendor B Controller Platform Applications on Top Vendor A Build Feature Switch Adds OpenFlow Client Customer Picks Controller Picks Switch Best-of-breed Innovation now can happen!
OPENFLOW DEPLOYMENTS TODAY SDN is doing very well ONS with 1,600 attendees NSX at $100m run rate, 150 customers BSN had $1m in pre-orders for it s Cloud Fabric Analyst predictions are going up There are very few deployments that follow the original mode. Why is this the case?
OPENFLOW DEVELOPMENT For hardware switches, the original model slows down innovation 4.5 years New Chip Feature under NDA OpenFlow 1.X Standard dev Vendors implement OF 1.X on Switch Controller Development 1 year 1 year 1.5 years 1 years New Chip Merchant Silicon updates every 18-24 months? New Chip New Chip Result: Solu4ons Trail Hardware by 1-2 genera4ons
OPENFLOW DEVELOPMENT Implementation of switch and controller accelerates time to market Standards Based Model 4.5 years New Chip Feature under NDA Standards Discussion Vendors implement on Switch Controller Development 1 year 1 year 1.5 years 1 years Proprietary Model 1.5 years New Chip Vendor implements feature on Switch Vendor implements feature on Controller 1 3
SDN ARCHITECTURE TODAY Three types of solutions: Overlay Networks Moves the software into the hypervisor Decouples software from hw switches Easy to deploy, rapid adoption Closed SDN Fabrics One company ships controller and switch Proprietary Protocol No separation of hardware and software, no flexibility for customer to pick best of breed SDN + Bare Metal Switches + Open Source Main topic of the talk
Bare Metal Switches
WHAT DO THESE SWITCHES HAVE IN COMMON? Arista 7050S- 64 IBM BNT Rackswitch G8264 Alcatel Lucent 6900 Juniper QFX 3500 Cisco Nexus 3064 Quanta T3048- LY2 Dell Force 10 S4810 HP5900af 48xg Edge Core AS5600-52X
WHAT DO THESE SWITCHES HAVE IN COMMON? Arista 7050S- 64 Juniper QFX 3500 IBM BNT Rackswitch G8264 Switching Chip: BRCM Trident(+) Same L2/L3 Table Sizes Same number of ACLs Same throughput Cisco Nexus 3064 Largely iden9cal feeds & speeds Alcatel Lucent 6900 Quanta T3048- LY2 Dell Force 10 S4810 HP5900af 48xg Edge Core AS5600-52X
Open Source Sofware
NETWORKING AND OPEN SOURCE For Compute Infrastructure, Open Source is Common Linux KVM OpenStack Apache MySQL Hadoop etc. For Networking Infrastructure, it is not. All major switch operating systems are closed source Protocol implementations also closed SDK access for switching chips is under NDA only This is about to change
OPEN SOURCE FOR SWITCHES SDN Forwarding Agent Networking Chip API Base Operating System Switch Boot Loader Open vswitch, Indigo etc. https://github.com/floodlight/indigo http://git.openvswitch.org/cgi-bin/ gitweb.cgi Broadcom OF- DPA, the OpenFlow data plane abstrac9on. https://github.com/broadcom-switch Open Networking Linux. Submihed to the Open Compute Project. http://github.com/opennetworklinux/ ONIE Boot Loader, Standardized by the Open Compute Project. http://onie.github.io/onie/
HOW WILL THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE? One Example: SDN Controller + OpenFlow + Bare Metal Switch SDN Controller Features/Apps SDN Controller SDN Controller Open Source Protocol Stack OpenFlow with Extensions Ideally, pluggable architecture Bare Metal Switch OS Network OS System SDN Client Merchant Silicon Bare Metal Switch Switch Opera4ng System Open Source Protocol Stack OpenFlow with Extensions Ideally, pluggable architecture Bare Metal Switch Standardized Hardware Standardized Boot Loader
SUMMARY The future of Networking is SDN Networking is becoming a software industry Software and Hardware are separating PC revolution coming to networking We have learned a lot since the early days Standardize first, develop second is difficult For rapid innovation, you need to develop controller and switch together SDN Deployment Models #1 Overlays: move networking into the hypervisor #2 Bare Metal + SDN: Hardware switches with a choice of software Both options work together well.
THANK YOU!