ONS 2013, RouteFlow and NetDEF

Today is the first day of Open Networking Summit 2013. ONS 2013 as the name implies, is focused on Open Networking such as SDN, OpenFlow, Network Controllers, etc. There have been a lot of great announcements such as: Extreme Networks Announces OpenStack Quantum and OpenFlow support in their campus switches. Extreme Networks, Inc., today announced that it will be present … [Read more...]

Updates to the Reference Controller

ProjectW Updates and More After a great presentation at NANOG by Scott Whyte of Google, there have been quite a few updates to the ProjectW system. The bootable CD is v0.5 Support for MPLS and ISIS Support for controlling multiple switches at the same time Router Analysis plans to integrate the changes from v0.5 into the Reference Controller.  There will be no … [Read more...]

Network Device Education Foundation

The Network Device Education Foundation On February 27th, 2013 the Network Device Education Foundation, Inc.(NetDEF) a not for profit entity was formed.  The Foundation has many goals, one of the most important is to carry on the philanthropic mission of Router Analysis, Inc.  The Foundation will initially be funded out of my own pocket and eventually by companies such as P … [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 State of OpenFlow 2012 – Report and Analysis

The State of OpenFlow 2012 - Report and Analysis In partnership with SiliconANGLE we are proud to release The State of OpenFlow 2012 - Report and Analysis. Here are some snippets from the report: Testing Session Overview The goal of the testing was straightforward; confirm that currently available switches interoperate with two of the most used OpenFlow controllers, Floodlight … [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...]

State of OpenFlow 2012 Testing Notes – Days 12-14 – IWNetworks SDN 8952S

More Information on Latency and Testing the IWNetworks SDN 8952S We are happy to be able to announce the third vendor in our tests: IWNetworks. The IWNetworks SDN 8952S OpenFlow capable 10/40GbE Switch IWNetworks has provided Router Analysis with an SDN 8952S switch.  The SDN 8952S is a 48 port 10GE + 4 port 40GE line-rate capable switch with OpenFlow v1.0 support.  In our t … [Read more...]

State of OpenFlow 2012 – A Christmas Day Update

Latency and Time to first Packet/Byte This question has come up a few times from customers and researchers alike.  How much latency do you add using an OpenFlow based networking stack. The question has a few answers and I will try to cover them here. The main answer is, the added latency normally only affects the first packet or two.  In my setup I generally see between 2 … [Read more...]