Tag Archives: OpenFlow

OpenFlow Is Dead. Long Live OpenFlow.

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The King Is Dead - Long Live The King

Remember OpenFlow? The hammer that was set to solve all of our vaguely nail-like problems? Remember how everything was going to be based on OpenFlow going forward and the world was going to be a better place? Or how heretics like Ivan Pepelnjak (@IOSHints) that dared to ask questions about scalability or value of application were derided and laughed at? Yeah, good times. Today, I stand here to eulogize OpenFlow, but not to bury it. And perhaps find out that OpenFlow has a much happier life after death.

OpenFlow Is The Viagra Of Networking

OpenFlow is not that much different than Sildenafil, the active ingredient in Vigara. Both were initially developed to do something that they didn’t end up actually solving. In the case of Sildenafil, it was high blood pressure. The “side effect” of raising blood pressure in a specific body part wasn’t even realized until after the trials of the drug. The side effect because the primary focus of the medication that was eventually developed into a billion dollar industry.

In the same way, OpenFlow failed at its stated mission of replacing the forwarding plane programming method of switches. As pointed out by folks like Ivan, it had huge scalability issues. It was a bit clunky when it came to handling flow programming. The race from 1.0 to 1.3 spec finalization left vendors in the dust, but the freeze on 1.3 for the past few years has really hurt innovation. Objectively, the fact that almost no major shipping product uses OpenFlow as a forwarding paradigm should be evidence of it’s failure.

The side effect of OpenFlow is that it proved that networking could be done in software just as easily as it could be done in hardware. Things that we thought we historically needed ASICs and FPGAs to do could be done by a software construct. OpenFlow proved the viability of Software Defined Networking in a way that no one else could. Yet, as people abandoned it for other faster protocols or rewrote their stacks to take advantage of other methods, OpenFlow did still have a great number of uses.

OpenFlow Is a Garlic Press, Not A Hammer

OpenFlow isn’t really designed to solve every problem. It’s not a generic tool that can be used in a variety of situations. It has some very specific use cases that it does excel at doing, though. Think more like a garlic press. It’s a use case tool that is very specific for what it does and does that thing very well.

This video from Networking Field Day 13 is a great example of OpenFlow being used for a specific task. NEC’s flavor of OpenFlow, ProgrammableFlow, is used on conjunction with higher layer services like firewalls and security appliances to mitigate the spread of infections. That’s a huge win for networking professionals. Think about how hard it would be to track down these systems in a network of thousands of devices. Even worse, with the level of virulence of modern malware, it doesn’t take long before the infected system has infected others. It’s not enough to shut down the payload. The infection behavior must be removed as well.

What NEC is showing is the ultimate way to stop this from happening. By interrogating the flows against a security policy, the flow entries can be removed from switches across the network or have deny entries written to prevent communications. Imagine being able to block a specific workstation from talking to anything on the network until it can be cleaned. And have that happen automatically without human interaction. What if a security service could get new malware or virus definitions and install those flow entries on the fly? Malware could be stopped before it became a problem.

This is where OpenFlow will be headed in the future. It’s no longer about adapting the problems to fit the protocol. We can’t keep trying to frame the problem around how much it resembles a nail just so we can use the hammer in our toolbox. Instead, OpenFlow will live on as a point protocol in a larger toolbox that can do a few things really well. That means we’ll use it when we need to and use a different tool when needed that better suits the problem we’re actually trying to solve. That will ensure that the best tool is used for the right job in every case.

Tom’s Take

OpenFlow is still useful. Look at what Coho Data is using it for. Or NEC. Or any one of a number of companies that are still developing on it. But the fact that these companies have put significant investment and time into the development of the protocol should tell you what the larger industry thinks. They believe that OpenFlow is a dead end that can’t magically solve the problems they have with their systems. So they’ve moved to a different hammer to bang away with. I think that OpenFlow is going to live a very happy life now that people are leaving it to solve the problems it’s good at solving. Maybe one day we’ll look back on the first life of OpenFlow not as a failure, but instead as the end of the beginning of it become what it was always meant to be.

Hypermyopia In The World Of Networking

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The more debate I hear over protocols and product positioning in the networking market today, the more I realize that networking has a very big problem with myopia when it comes to building products. Sometimes that’s good. But when you can’t even see the trees for the bark, let alone the forest, then it’s time to reassess what’s going on.

Way Too Close

Sit down in a bar in Silicon Valley and you’ll hear all kinds of debates about which protocols you should be using in your startup’s project. OpenFlow has its favorite backers. Others say things like Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT) are the way to go. Still others have backed a new favorite draft protocol that’s being fast-tracked at the IETF meetings. The debates go on and on. It ends up looking a lot like this famous video.

But what does this have to do with the product? In the end, do the users really care which transport protocol you used? Is the forward table population mechanism of critical importance to them? Or are they more concerned with how the system works? How easy it is to install? How effective it is at letting them do their jobs?

The hypermyopia problem makes the architecture and engineering people on these projects focus on the wrong set of issues. They think that an elegant and perfect solution to a simple technical problem will be the magical panacea that will sell their product by the truckload. They focus on such minute sets of challenges that they often block out the real problems that their product is going to face.

Think back to IBM in the early days of the Internet. Does anyone remember Blue Lightning? How about the even older MCA Bus? I bet if I said OS/2 I’d get someone’s attention. These were all products that IBM put out that were superior to their counterparts in many ways. Faster speeds, better software architecture, and even revolutionary ideas about peripheral connection. And yet all of them failed miserably in one way or another. Was it because they weren’t technically complete? Or was it because IBM had a notorious problem with marketing and execution when it came to non-mainframe computing?

Take A Step Back

Every writer in technology uses Apple as a comparison company at some point. In this case, you should take a look at their simplicity. What protocol does FaceTime use? Is it SIP? Or H.264? Does it even matter? FaceTime works. Users like that it works. They don’t want to worry about traversing firewalls or having supernodes available. They don’t want to fiddle with settings and tweak timers to make a video call work.

Enterprise customers are very similar. Think about WAN technologies for a moment. Entire careers have been built around finding easy ways to connect multiple sites together. We debate Frame Relay versus ATM. Should we use MPLS? What routing protocol should we use? The debates go on and on. Yet the customer wants connectivity, plain and simple.

At the recent Networking Field Day 9, two companies that specialize in software defined WAN (SD-WAN) had a chance to present. Velocloud and CloudGenix both showcased their methods for creating WANs with very little need for user configuration. The delegates were impressed that the respective company’s technologies “just worked”. No tuning timers. No titanic arguments about MPLS. Just simple wizards and easy configuration.

That’s what enterprise technology should be. It shouldn’t involve a need to get so close to the technology that you lose the big picture. It shouldn’t be a series of debates about which small technology choice to make. It should just work. Users that spend less time implementing technology spend more time using it. They spend more time happy with it. And they’re more likely to buy from you again.

Tom’s Take

If I hear one more person arguing the merits of their technology favorite again, I may throw up. Every time someone comes to me and tells me that I should bet on their horse in the race because it is better or faster or more elegant, I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake some sense into them. People don’t buy complicated things. People hate elegant but overly difficult systems. They just want things to work at the end of the day. They want to put as little thought into a system as they can to maximize the return they get from it. If product managers spent the next iteration of design focusing on ease-of-use instead of picking the perfect tunneling protocol, I think they would see a huge return on their investment in the long run. And that’s something you can see no matter how close you are.

 

The Packet Flow Duality

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Quantum physics is a funny thing. It seeks to solve all the problems in the physical world by breaking everything down into the most basic unit possible. That works for a lot of the observable universe. But when it comes to light, quantum physics has issues. Thanks to experiments and observations, most scientists understand that light isn’t just a wave and it’s not just a collection of particles either. It’s both. This concept is fundamental to understanding how light behaves. But can it also explain how data behaves?

Moving Things Around

We tend to think about data as a series of discrete data units being pushed along a path. While these units might be frames, packets, or datagrams depending on the layer of the OSI model that you are operating at, the result is still the same. A single unit is evaluated for transmission. A brilliant post from Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) sums up the forwarding thusly:

  • Frames being forwarded by MAC address lookup occur at layer 2 (switching)
  • Packets being forwarded by IP address lookup occur at layer 3 (routing)
  • Data being forwarded at higher levels is a stream of packets (flow forwarding)

It’s simple when you think about it. But what makes it a much deeper idea is that lookup at layer 2 and 3 requires a lot more processing. Each of the packets must be evaluated to be properly forwarded. The forwarding device doesn’t assume that the destination is the same for a group of similar packets. Each one must be evaluated to ensure it arrives at the proper location. By focusing on the discrete nature of the data, we are forced to expend a significant amount of energy to make sense of it. As anyone that studied basic packet switching can tell you, several tricks were invented to speed up this process. Anyone remember store-and-forward versus cut-through switching?

Flows behave differently. They contain state. They have information that helps devices make intelligent forwarding decisions. Those decisions don’t have to be limited by destination MAC or IP addresses. They can be labels or VLANs or other pieces of identifying information. They can be anything an application uses to talk to another device, like a DNS entry. It allows us to make a single forwarding decision per flow and implement it quickly and efficiently. Think about a stateful firewall. It works because the information for a given packet stream (or flow) can be programmed into the device. The firewall is no longer examining every individual packet, but instead evaluates the entire group of packets when making decisions.

Consequently, stageful firewalls also give us a peek at how flows are processed. Rather than having a CAM table or an ARP table, we have a group of rules and policies. Those policies can say “given a group of packets in a flow matching these characteristics, execute the following actions”. That’s a far cry from trying to figure out where each one goes.

It’s All About Scale

A single drop of water is discrete. Just like a single data packet, it represents an atomic unit of water. Taken in this measurement, a single drop of water does little good. It’s only when those drops start to form together that their usefulness becomes apparent. Think of a river or a firehose. Those groups of droplets have a vector. They can be directed somewhere to accomplish something, like putting out a fire or cutting a channel across the land.

Flows should be the atomic unit that we base our networking decisions upon. Flows don’t require complex processing on a per-unit basis. Flows carry additional information above and beyond a 48-bit hex address or a binary address representing an IP entry. Flows can be manipulated and programmed. They can have policies applied. Flows can scale to great heights. Packets and frames are forever hampered by the behaviors necessary to deliver them to the proper locations.

Data is simultaneously a packet and a flow. We can’t separate the two. What we can do is change our frame of reference for operations. Just like experiments with light, we must choose one aspect of the duality to act until such time as the other aspect is needed. Light can be treated like a wave the majority of the time. It’s only when things like the photoelectric effect happen that our reference must change. In the same way, data should be treated like a flow for the majority of cases. Only when the very basic needs of packet/frame/datagram forwarding are needed should we abandon our flow focus and treat it as a group of discrete packets.

Tom’s Take

The idea of data flows isn’t new. And neither is treating flows as the primary form of forwarding. That’s what OpenFlow has been doing for quite a while now. What makes this exciting is when people with new networking ideas start using the flow as an atomic unit for decisions. When you remove the need to do packet-by-packet forwarding and instead focus on the flow, you gain a huge insight into the world around the packet. It’s not much a stretch to think that the future of networking isn’t as concerned with the switching of frames or routing of packets. Instead, it’s the forwarding of a flow of packets that will be exciting to watch. As long as you remember that data can be both packet and flow you will have taken your first step into a larger world of understanding.

 

The Atomic Weight of Policy

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The OpenDaylight project put out a new element this week with their Helium release.  The second release is usually the most important, as it shows that you have a real project on your hands and not just a bunch of people coding in the back room to no avail.  Not that something like that was going to happen to ODL.  The group of people involved in the project have the force of will to change the networking world.

Helium is already having an effect on the market.  Brocade announced their Vyatta Controller last week, which is based on Helium code.  Here’s a handy video as well.  The other thing that Helium has brought forth is the ongoing debate about network policy.  And I think that little gem is going to have more weight in the long run than anything else.

The Best Policy

Helium contains group-based policies for making groups of network objects talk to each other.  It’s a crucial step to bring ODL from an engineering hobby project to a full-fledged product that can be installed by someone that isn’t a code wizard.  That’s because most of the rest of the world, including IT people, don’t speak in specific terms with devices.  They have an idea of what needs to be done and they rely on the devices to implement that idea.

Think about a firewall.  When is the last time you wrote a firewall rule by hand? Unless you are a CLI masochist, you use the GUI to craft a policy that says something like “prevent DNS queries from any device that isn’t a DNS server (referenced by this DNS Server object list)”.  We create those kinds of policies because we can’t account for every new server appearing on the network that wants to make a DNS query.  We block the ones that don’t need to be doing it, and we modify the DNS Server object list to add new servers when needed.

Yet, in networking we’re still playing with access lists and VLAN databases.  We must manually propagate this information throughout the network when updates occur.  Because no one relies on VTP to add and prune information in the network.  The tools we’ve been using to do this work are archaic and failure-prone at best.

Staying Neutral

The inclusion of policy components of Helium will go a long way to paving the road for more of the same in future releases.  Of course, there is already talk about Cisco’s OpFlex and how it didn’t make the cut for Helium despite being one of the most dense pieces of code proposed for ODL.  It’s good that Cisco and ODL both realized that putting out code that wasn’t ready was only going to hurt in the long run.  When you’ve had seven or eight major releases, you can lay an egg with a poorly implemented feature and it won’t be the end of the world.  But if you put out a stinker in the second release, you may not make it to the third.

But this isn’t about OpFlex.  Or Congress. Or any other policy language that might be proposed for ODL in the future.  It’s about making sure that ODL is a policy-driven controller infrastructure.  Markus Nispel of Extreme talked about SDN at Wireless Field Day 7.  In that presentation, he said that he thinks the industry will standardize on ODL as the northbound interface in the network.  For those not familiar, the northbound interface is the one that is user-facing.  We interact with the northbound controller interface while the southbound controller interface programs the devices.

ODL is making sure the southbound interface is OpenFlow.  What they need to do now is ensure the northbound interface can speak policy to the users configuring it.  We’ve all heard the rhetoric of “network engineers need to learn coding” or “non-programmers will be out of a job soon”.  But the harsher reality is that while network programmers are going to be very busy people on the backend, the day-to-day operations of the network will be handled by different teams.  Those teams don’t speak IOS, Junos, or OpenFlow.  They think in policy-based thoughts.

Ops teams don’t want to know how something is going to work when implemented.  They don’t want to spend hours troubleshooting why a VLAN didn’t populate only to find they typoed the number.  They want to plug information into a policy and let the controller do the rest.  That’s what Helium has started and what ODL represents.  An interface into the network for mortal Ops teams.  A way to make that work for everyone, whether it be an OpFlex interface into Cisco APIC programming ACI or a Congress interface to an NSX layer.  If you are a the standard controller, you need to talk to everyone no matter their language.

Tom’s Take

ODL is going to be the controller in SDN.  There is too much behind it to let it fail.  Vendors are going to adopt it as their base standard for SDN.  They may add bells and whistles but it will still be ODL underneath.  That means that ODL needs to set the standard for network interaction.  And that means policy.  Network engineers complain about fragility in networking and how it’s hard to do and in the very same breath say they don’t want the CLI to go away.  What they need to say is that policy gives everyone the flexibility to create robust, fault-tolerant configurations with a minimum of effort while still allowing for other interface options, like CLI and API.  If you are the standard, you can’t play favorites.  Policy is going to be the future of networking interfaces.  If you don’t believe that, you’ll find yourself quickly crushed under the weight of reality.

Who Wants A Free Puppy?

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Years ago, my wife was out on a shopping trip. She called me excitedly to tell me about a blonde shih-tzu puppy she found and just had to have. As she talked, I thought about all the things that this puppy would need to thrive. Regular walks, food, and love are paramount on the list. I told her to use her best judgement rather than flat out saying “no”. Which is also how I came to be a dog owner. Today, I’ve learned there is a lot more to puppies (and dogs) than walks and feeding. There is puppy-proofing your house. And cleaning up after accidents. And teaching the kids that puppies should be treated gently.

An article from Martin Glassborow last week made me start thinking about our puppy again. Scott McNealy is famous for having told the community that “Open Source is free like a puppy.” back in 2005. While this was a dig at the community in regards to the investment that open source takes, I think Scott was right on the mark. I also think Martin’s recent article illustrates some of the issues that management and stakeholders don’t see with comunity projects.

Open software today takes care and feeding. Only instead of a single OS on a server in the back of the data center, it’s all about new networking paradigms (OpenFlow) or cloud platform plays (OpenStack). This means there are many more moving parts. Engineers and programmers get it. But go to the stakeholders and try to explain what that means. The decision makers love the price of open software. They are ambivalent to the benefits to the community. However, the cost of open projects is usually much higher than the price. People have to invest to see benefits.

TNSTAAFL

At the recent SolidFire Summit, two cloud providers were talking about their software. One was hooked in to the OpenStack community. He talked about having an entire team dedicating to pulling nightly builds and validating them. They hacked their own improvements and pushed them back upstream for the good of the community. He seemed love what he was talking about. The provider next to him was just a little bit larger. When asked what his platform was he answered “CloudStack”. When I asked why, he didn’t hesitate. “They have support options. I can have them fix all my issues.”

Open projects appeal to the hobbiest in all of us. It’s exciting to build something from the ground up. It’s a labor of love in many cases. Labors of love don’t work well for some enterprises though. And that’s the part that most decision makers need to know. Support for this awesome new thing may not alwasy be immediate or complete. To bring this back to the puppy metaphor, you have to have patience as your puppy grows up and learns not to chew on slippers.

The reward for all this attention? A loving pet in the case of the puppy. In the case of open software, you have a workable framework all your own that is customized to your needs and very much a part of your DNA. Supported by your staff and hopefull loved as much or more than any other solution. Just like dog owners that look forward to walking the dog or playing catch at the dog part, your IT organization should look forward to the new and exciting challenges that can be solved with the investment of time.

Tom’s Take

Nothing is free. You either pay for it with money or with time. Free puppies require the latter, just as free software projects do. If the stakeholders in the company look at it as an investment of time and energy then you have the right frame of mind from the outset. If everything isn’t clear up front, you will find yourself needing to defend all the time you’ve spent on your no-cost project. Hopefully your stakeholders are dog people so they understand that the payoff isn’t in the price, but the experience.

The OpenFlow Longbow

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The label of disruption seems to be thrown around quite a bit.  I’ve heard tablets being called the disruptive technology when it comes to PCs.  I’ve also heard people talking about software defined networking (SDN) as the disruptive technology to the way that we’ve been doing networking for the last decade.  Nowhere is that more true than with OpenFlow.  But what does this disruption mean?  Aren’t we still essentially forwarding packets the same way we have in the past?  To get a frame of reference, let’s look at one of my favorite disruptive technologies – the longbow.

Who Are Yew?

The Welsh yew longbow had been a staple of the English military as far back as 600AD.  The recurve shape of the bow provided for a faster, longer arrow flight than the shorter bows used by foot soldiers and mounted calvary.  The wood was especially important, as the yew tree was only really found in abundance in Wales.  Longbows existed in one form or another in many armies in Europe, but the Welsh bow was the only one that was feared.

The advantage was never more apparent than during the Hundred Years War between England and France.  The longbow was deployed as a mid-range artillery to harass advancing troops.  There are questions about whether or not the arrows were able to pierce the plate armor used by knights at the time, but the results of archery corps can’t be denied.  Especially in the Battle of Agincourt.  The English used longbows to slow the advance of French forces in armor, tiring them out as they crossed the field and holding them at bay until the heavier foot soldiers of the English army could be repositioned to take the advancing enemy apart.  Agincourt was a win for the English and fives years later, the war was over.

The longbow proved itself to be a very disruptive technology.  Not because it killed soldiers better or faster than a mace or broadsword.  It was disruptive because it changed the way generals composed their armies.  Instead of relying on heavy assault troops in armor to punch a hole in the enemy lines, the longbow forced a soldier to become more mobile with less armor to be able to cross the range of the bow much more quickly and close to a range where the technology advantage was negated.  Bowmen were at a distinct advantage at point-blank range.  Armies grew more mobile all the way up to the point where a new technology disrupted the reign of the longbow: gunpowder.  Once musketeers became more prevalent, they replaced the role traditionally held by the longbow archer.

Disrupting the Flow

How does this history lesson apply to OpenFlow?  OpenFlow is poised to disrupt networking in the same way as the longbow forced people to take a new look at their armies.  OpenFlow takes something we know about and turns it on its head.  It gives us much more control over how a switch forwards packets.  It also makes us ask questions about how we build our networks.

Questions about big core switches, spine-and-leaf topologies, and the intelligence of edge devices all become very pertinent in an OpenFlow design.  Should I put a larger switch at the edge since it’s going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting?  Should I use a fabric in place of a three-tier design?  Will my controller allow me to use different interconnects to ensure high-speed traffic flows east and west in the data center?

OpenFlow is taking over some vendors offerings.  NEC and HP have already committed to OpenFlow designs.  Even companies that haven’t really embraced OpenFlow have decided to offer it rather than dismiss it.  Arista and Cisco are offering new switches that have support for OpenFlow, even if that support may not extend to more proprietary enhancements right now.  Just like the longbow, OpenFlow is forcing the opposition to reconfigure the way they fight the battle.  They may not like it.  They may even say in private that they’re just doing it to mollify a part of the customer base looking for specific points in an proposal.  But they are still dedicating time and effort to OpenFlow all the same.

Tom’s Take

Disruption happens all the time.  We don’t use cell phones in bags hardwired into our vehicles any more.  Our computers are the size of a broom closet and run off of punch cards.  Just like weapons in the ancient world, whoever comes up with a more effective way of winning battles enjoys a distinct advantage for a time.  Eventually, something comes along that disrupts the disruption.  OpenFlow is currently the king of the SDN battlefield.  It holds that title by virtue of how many people are racing to interoperate with it.  Eventually, it will be dethroned just as the longbow was.  They key will be recognizing the next new thing first and using it to your advantage.  And arming your archers with it.

Should Microsoft Buy Big Switch?

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Network virtualization is getting more press than ever.  The current trend seems to be pitting the traditional networking companies, like Cisco and Juniper, against the upstarts in the server virtualization companies, like VMware and OpenStack.  To hear the press and analysts talk about it makes one think that these companies represent all there is in the industry.

Whither Microsoft?

One company that seems to have been left out of the conversation is Microsoft.  The stalwarts of Redmond have been turning heads with their rapid pace of innovation to reach parity with VMware’s offerings.  However, when the conversation turns to networking Microsoft is usually left out in the cold.  That’s because their efforts at networking in the past have been…problematic.  They are very service oriented and care little for the world outside their comfortable servers.  That won’t last forever.  VMware will be able to easily shift the conversation away from feature parity with Hyper-V and concentrate on all the networking expertise that it has now that is missing in the competitor.

Microsoft can fix that problem with a small investment.  If you can innovate by building it, you need to buy it.  Microsoft has the cash to buy several startups, even after sinking a load of it into Nokia.  But which SDN-focused company makes the most sense for Microsoft?  I spent a lot of time thinking about this very question and the answer became clear for me:  Microsoft needs to buy Big Switch Networks.

A Window On The Future

Microsoft needs SDN expertise.  They have no current networking experience outside of creating DHCP and DNS services on their platforms.  I mean, did anyone ever use their Network Access Protocol solution as a NAC option?  Microsoft has traditionally created bare bones network constructs to please their server customers.  They think networking is a resource outside their domain, which coincidentally is just how their competitors used to look at it as well.  At least until Martin Casado changed their minds.

Big Switch is a perfect fit for Microsoft.  They have the chops to talk OpenFlow.  Their recent shift away from overlays to software on bare metal would play well as a marketing point against VMware and their “overlays are the best way” message.  They could also help Microsoft do more development on NV-GRE, the also ran to VxLAN.  Ivan Pepelnjak (@IOSHints) was pretty impressed with NV-GRE last December, but it’s dropped of the radar in the wake of VMware embracing VxLAN in NSX.  I think having a bit more development work from the minds at Big Switch would put it back into the minds of some smaller network virtualization companies looking to support something other than the de facto standard.  I know that Big Switch has moved away from the overlay model, but if NV-GRE can easily be adapted to the work Big Switch was doing a few months ago, it would be a great additional offering to the idea of running everything in an SDN-enabled switch OS.

Microsoft will also benefit from the pile of SDN applications that Big Switch has rumored to be sitting around and festering for lack of attention.  Applications like network taps sell Big Switch products now.  With NSX introducing the ideas of integrated load balancers and firewalls into the base product, Big Switch is going to be hard pressed to charge extra for them.  Instead, they’re going to have to go out on a limb and finish developing them past the alpha stage and hope that they are enough to sell more product and recoup the development costs.  With the deep pockets in Redmond, finishing those applications would be a drop in the bucket if it means that the new product can compete directly on an even field with VMware.

Building A Bigger Switch

Big Switch gains in this partnership also.  They get to take some pressure of their overworked development team.  It can’t be easy switching horses in mid-stream, especially when it involves changing your entire outlook on how SDN should be done.  Adding a few dozen more people to the project will allow you to branch out and investigate how integrating software into your ideas could be done.  Big Switch has already done a great job developing Project Floodlight.  Why not let some big brains chew on other ideas in the same vein for a while.

Big Switch could also use the stability of working for an established company.  They have a pretty big target on their backs now that everyone is developing an SDN strategy.  Writing an OS for bare metal switches is going to bring them into contention with Cumulus Networks.  Why not let an OS vendor do some of the heavy lifting?  It would also allow Microsoft’s well established partner program to offer incentives to partners that want to sell white label switches with software from Big Switch to get into networking much more cheaply than before.  Think about federal or educational discounts that Microsoft already gives to customers.  Do you think they’d be excited to see the same kind of consideration when it comes to networking hardware?

Tom’s Take

Little fish either get eaten by bigger ones or they have to be agile enough to avoid being snapped up.  The smartest little fish in the ocean may be the remora.  It survives by attaching itself to a bigger fish and providing a benefit for them both.  The remora gets the protection of not being eaten while also not taking too much from the host.  Microsoft would do well to setup some kind of similar arrangement with Big Switch.  They could fund future development into NV-GRE compatible options, or they just by the company outright.  Both parties get something out of the deal: Microsoft gets the SDN component they need.  Big Switch gets a backer with so much industry clout that they can no longer be dismissed.

HP Networking and the Software Defined Store

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HP

HP has had a pretty good track record with SDN.  Even if it’s not very well-known.  HP has embraced OpenFlow on a good number of its Procurve switches.  Given the age of these devices, there’s a good chance you can find them laying around in labs or in retired network closets to test with.  But where is that going to lead in the long run?

HP Networking was kind enough to come to Interop New York and participate in a Tech Field Day roundtable.  It had been a while since I talked to their team.  I wanted to see how they were handling the battle being waged between OpenFlow proponents like NEC and Brocade, Cisco and their hardware focus, and VMware with NSX.  Jacob Rapp and Chris Young (@NetManChris) stepped up to the plate to talk about SDN and the vision on HP.

They cover a lot of ground in here.  Probably the most important piece to me is the SDN app store.

The press picked up on this quickly.  HP has an interesting idea here.  I should know.  I mentioned it in passing in an article I wrote a month ago.  The more I think about the app store model, the more I realize that many vendors are going to go down the road.  Just not in the way HP is thinking.

HP wants to curate content for enterprises.  They want to ensure that software works with their controller to be sure that there aren’t any hiccups in implementation.  Given their apparent distaste for open source efforts, it’s safe to say that their efforts will only benefit HP customers.  That’s not to say that those same programs won’t work on other controllers.  So long as they operate according to the guidelines laid down by the Open Networking Foundation, all should be good.

Show Me The Money

Where’s the value then?  That’s in positioning the apps in the store.  Yes, you’re going to have some developers come to HP and want to simple apps to put in the store.  Odds are better that you’re going to see more recognizable vendors coming to the HP SDN store.  People are more likely to buy software from a name they recognize, like TippingPoint or F5.  That means that those companies are going to want to have a prime spot in the store.  HP is going to make something from hosting those folks.

The real revenue doesn’t come from an SMB buying a load balancer once.  It comes from a company offering it as a service with a recurring fee.  The vendor gets a revenue stream. HP would be wise to work out a recurring fee as well.  It won’t be the juicy 30% cut that Apple enjoys from their walled garden, but anything would be great for the bottom line.  Vendors win from additional sales.  Customers win from having curated apps that work every time that are easy to purchase, install, and configure.  HP wins because everyone comes to them.

Fragmentation As A Service

Now that HP has jumped on the idea of an enterprise-focused SDN app store, I wonder which company will be the next to offer one?  I also worry that having multiple app stores won’t end up being cumbersome in the long run.  Small developers won’t like submitting their app to four or five different vendor-affiliated stores.  More likely they’ll resort to releasing code on their own rather than jump through hoops.  That will eventually lead to support fragmentation.  Fragmentation helps no one.

Tom’s Take

HP Networking did a great job showcasing what they’ve been doing in SDN.  It was also nice to hear about their announcements the day before they broke wide to the press.  I think HP is going to do well with OpenFlow on their devices.  Integrating OpenFlow visibility into their management tools is also going to do wonders for people worried about keeping up with all the confusing things that SDN can do to a traditional network.  The app store is a very intriguing concept that bears watching.  We can only hope that it ends up being a well-respect entry in a long line of easing customers into the greater SDN world.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

HP was a presenter at the Tech Field Day Interop Roundtable.  In addition, they also provided the delegates a 1TB USB3 hard disk drive.  They did not ask for any consideration in the writing of this review nor were they promised any.  The conclusions and analysis contained in this post are mine and mine alone.

SDN 101 at ONUG Academy

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Software defined networking is king of the hill these days in the greater networking world.  Vendors are contemplating strategies.  Users are demanding functionality.  And engineers are trying to figure out what it all means.  What’s needed is a way for vendor-neutral parties to get together and talk about what SDN represents and how best to implement it.  Most of the talk so far has been at vendor-specific conferences like Cisco Live or at other conferences like Interop.  I think a third option has just presented itself.

Nick Lippis (@NickLippis) has put together a group of SDN-focused people to address concerns about implementation and usage.  The Open Networking User Group (ONUG) was assembled to allow large companies using SDN to have a semi-annual meeting to discuss strategy and results.  It allows Facebook to talk to JP Morgan about what they are doing to simplify networking through use of things like OpenFlow.

This year, ONUG is taking it a step further by putting on the ONUG Academy, a day-long look at SDN through the eyes of those that implement it.  They have assembled a group of amazing people, including the founder of Cumulus Networks and Tech Field Day’s own Brent Salisbury (@NetworkStatic).  There will be classes about optimizing networks for SDN as well as writing SDN applications for the most popular controllers on the market.  Nick shares more details about the ONUG academy here:

If you’re interested in attending ONUG either for the academy or for the customer-focused meetings, you need to register today.  As a special bonus, if you use the code TFD10 when you sign up, you can take 10% of the cost of registration.  Use that extra cash to go out and buy a cannoli or two.

I’ll be at ONUG with Tech Field Day interviewing customers and attendees about their SDN strategies as well as where they think the state of the industry is headed.  If you’re there, stop by and say hello.  And be sure to bring me one of those cannolis.

SDN and NFV – The Ups and Downs

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I was pondering the dichotomy between Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) the other day.  I’ve heard a lot of vendors and bloggers talking about how one inevitably leads to the other.  I’ve also seen a lot of folks saying that the two couldn’t be further apart on the scale of software networking.  The more I thought about these topics, the more I realized they are two sides of the coin.  The problem, at least in my mind, is the perspective.

SDN – Planning The Paradigm

Software Defined Networking telegraphs everything about what it is trying to accomplish right there in the name.  Specifically, the “Definition” part of the phrase.  I’ve made jokes in the past about the lack of definition in SDN as vendors try to adapt their solutions to fit the buzzword mold.  What I finally came to realize is that the SDN folks are all about definition. SDN is the Top Down approach to planning.  SDN seeks to decompose the network into subsystems that can be replaced or reprogrammed to suit the needs of those things which utilize the network.

As an example, SDN breaks the idea of switch down into things like “forwarding plane” and “control plane” and seeks to replace the control plane with alternative software, whether it be a controller-based architecture like OpenFlow or an overlay network similar to that of VMware/Nicira.  We can replace the OS of a switch with a concept like OpenFlow easily.  It’s just a mechanism for determining which entries are populated in the Content Addressable Memory (CAM) tables of the forwarding plane.  In top down design, it’s easy to create a stub entry or “black box” to hold information that flows into it.  We don’t particularly care how the black box works from the top of the design, just that it does its job when called upon.

Top Down designs tend to run into issues when those black boxes lack detail or are missing some critical functionality.  What happens when OpenFlow isn’t capable of processing flows fast enough to keep the CAM table of a campus switch populated with entries?  Is the switch going to fall back to process switching the packets?  That could be an big issue.  Top Down designs are usually very academic and elegant.  They also have a tendency to lack concrete examples and real world experience.  When you think about it, that does speak a lot about the early days of SDN – lots of definition of terminology and technology, but a severe lack of actual packet forwarding.

NFV – Working From The Ground Up

Network Function Virtualization takes a very different approach to the idea of turning hardware networks into software networks.  The driving principle behind NFV is replication of existing technology in a software state.  This is classic Bottom Up design.  Rather than spending a large amount of time planning and assembling the perfect system, Bottom Up designers tend to build as they go.  They concentrate on making something work first, then making their things work together second.

NFV is great for hands-on folks because it gives concrete, real results almost immediately. Once you’ve converted an load balancer or a router to a purely software-based construct you can see right away how it works and what the limitations might be.  Does it consume too many resources on the hypervisor?  Does it excel at forwarding small packets?  Does switching a large packet locally cause a fault?  These are problems that can be corrected in the individual system rapidly rather than waiting to modify the overall plan to account for difficulties in the virtualization process.

Bottom Up design does suffer from some issues as well.  The focus in Bottom Up is on getting things done on a case-by-case basis.  What do you do when you’ve converted all your hardware to software?  Do your NFV systems need to talk to one another?  That’s usually where Bottom Up design starts breaking down.  Without a grand plan at a higher level to ensure that systems can talk to each other this design methodology falls back to a series of “hacks” to get them connected.  Units developed in isolation aren’t required to play nice with everyone else until they are forced to do so.  That leads to increasing complex and fragile interconnection systems that could fail spectacularly should the wrong thread be yanked with sufficient force.

Tom’s Take

Which method is better?  Should we spend all our time planning the system and hope that our Powerpoint Designs work the right way when someone codes them in a few months?  Or should we say “damn the torpedoes” and start building things left and right and hope that someone will figure out a way to tie all these individual pieces together at some point?

Surprisingly, the most successful design requires elements of both.  People need to have a basic plan at the least when starting out on a plan to change the networking world.  Once the ideas are sketched out, you need a team of folks willing to burn the midnight oil and get the ideas implemented in real life to ensure that the plan works the right way.  The guidance from the top is essential to making sure everything works together in the end.

Whether you are leading from the top or the bottom, remember that everything has to meet in the middle sooner or later.