State of OpenFlow 2012 Testing Notes – Days 8-9

What will OpenFlow do for Networking in 2013? We are a little over a week into the testing phase of our State of OpenFlow 2012 report.  One trend we are following is the entrance of new vendors focusing on hardware and limited software, relying on Network APIs for control. On Friday we received a new OpenFlow based switch with 10G and 40G ports.  We were able to confirm t … [Read more...]

State of OpenFlow 2012 – One Week Update

(note: this article was posted originally on Silicon Angle as part of our community outreach) Is OpenFlow where it needs to be for 2013? My research firm Router Analysis, Inc. has spent the last week working with both Public and Private (unreleased) products supporting OpenFlow v1.0.  The goal of this exercise is to determine what vendors have delivered with regards to Ope … [Read more...]

State of Openflow 2012 Day 5/6 – Notes on HP

Are NEMs delivering on the promise of OpenFlow? Configuring the HP 6200yl to work with OpenFlow is a bit more complex than the pica8 pronto.  The main reason is that the HP 6200yl does not have dedicated management ports, so you have to use standard switch ports for management.  A lesson I have learned is to use higher ports such as 23/24 for the management and controller i … [Read more...]

State of OpenFlow Notes Day 4 – More RouteFlow

What is the state of OpenFlow at the end of 2012? A quick note about participants.  I made an early call that Brocade would be able to participate, they have determined that they will not be able to.  I want to thank all of the people at Brocade who worked hard to be involved in the project. And now onto my post. Today I am going to post some specific information r … [Read more...]

State of OpenFlow 2012 Notes – Day 3 RouteFlow

What is the State of OpenFlow at the end of 2012? Notes for Day Three, Sunday December 17th 2012. Today we did a lot of work with the Pronto 3290 switch. We used our in house tool to push flows into the Pronto until we either ran out of memory in Floodlight, or ran out of FIB space on the Pronto. We worked with RouteFlow via a live cd (Thanks Josh), made some … [Read more...]

State of OpenFlow 2012 Notes – Day One/Two

What is the State of OpenFlow at the end of 2012? This is the question we are looking to answer at Router Analysis, Inc.  Feel free to follow along, we will try to post updates every few days. Day One and Two Started Day One, Friday, December 14th, 2012 working with the HP 6200yl switch.  During staging on Thursday night we discovered that the HP switch is hardware locked to … [Read more...]

State of OpenFlow 2012 – Testing and Analysis

What is the state of OpenFlow as we transition into 2013? Router Analysis, Inc. will be taking the last few weeks of 2012 to put together a comprehensive report on the state of OpenFlow.  Our goal is to work with as many analysts and academics to understand where OpenFlow was expected to be vs where OpenFlow is.  While we will do OpenFlow testing, if anyone is expecting a b … [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...]