This upcoming week will be RIPE66 in Dublin, Ireland. While I wish I could go, my schedule does not permit. On the plus side, Martin Winter who has association with The Network Device Education Foundation (soon to take over Router Analysis as a project) will be attending and speaking. One of the important points that I try to push is Transparancy i.e. The Open concept. … [Read more...]
Building a Reference SDN Controller – Part 2 – Cable and Configure
The Machine is Built - Now Lets Set it Up! If all went well with building the machine from my first post, you should have a functional system running on a bootable ProjectW iso. For the next steps we will cable up the controller and make some changes to ProjectW to send traffic across the switches. The Router Analysis Reference SDN Controller Quick Setup … [Read more...]
Building a Reference SDN Controller – Part 1
The Reference SDN Controller Project Router Analysis has been working for the last six months constructing and testing a Reference SDN Controller. The project has two goals: Create a enterprise grade PC based system that compliments OpenFlow enabled switches that allows for an easy introduction to OpenFlow based SDN for Network Administrators. Create a baseline testing … [Read more...]
NFV’s Impact on Network Equipment Manufacturers
NFV as viewed by the Network Equipment Manufactures What the customers are looking for from NFV: With the advent of NFV the networking industry is seeing a big change in the historically conservative views of their Telco customers. The Telcos are willing to: Take a larger CapEx hit if it means very large reductions on OpEx Work with smaller (startup) vendors Give up … [Read more...]
The NFV Conundrum – A Migration Path
How to go from a stack of routers, firewalls and load balancers to servers virtualizing those functions. It started decades ago, routers, firewalls, load balancers, etc were and still are computers. The computers are more specialized, have FPGAs and other specialty hardware, but they are still computers. The reason the network had to move to the current generation of … [Read more...]
SDN and Overlay Networks – It’s all about fit and features
This post has been sitting in my queue since October, I felt it was time to let it go. It's all about fit and features in Software Defined Overlay Networks Midokura MidoNet: What is it? Midokura's MidoNet creates a fully-meshed overlay network built on top of your current IP network. MidoNet's defining feature is the claimed ability to fully process a packet at the edge of … [Read more...]
Network APIs and their impact on Network Architecture
Network APIs and their impact on Network Architecture In Network Architecture there are a many small decisions that go along with the one big one, mainly which vendor(s) to use. Some architects have their favorite, the vendor that has earned the architects trust. Other architects make a new decision each time, trying to base their vendor decision on both the clients wishes a … [Read more...]
ETSI Network Function Virtualization Working Group
Network Function Virtualization or NFV for short is a call to action that looks to aggregate resources across networking, compute and storage. A collaboration of many of the large players in the telecommunications space, the original NFV call to action focused on lowering the amount of proprietary hardware necessary to launch and operate services. The solution as discussed in t … [Read more...]
Vyatta Testing v6.5 R1 Two Page Summary
Here is the two page test summary as displayed in the Vyatta booth at the 12th Annual Cloud Computing Expo November 4-7th 2012 in Santa Clara, CA We want to thank Vyatta for all of their assistance and congratulate them again on their acquisition by Brocade. We expect the full report to be out in the next week or so. Vyatta Testing Summary for Cloud Computing Expo … [Read more...]
Network Operations and Overlay Networks
What Overlay Networks are being sold for today. Overlay Networks are being sold as the solution to scaling issues, be it VLAN, routes, MAC tables or other network limitations. Overlay Networks are built by using tunneling protocols such as GRE or IPinIP. The main customers for overlay solutions are those with older equipment that has not been refreshed in the past five or m … [Read more...]