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...]
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 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...]
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...]
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 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...]
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...]
Commodity Hardware is not the old machine you found under a desk.. You will often see "runs on commodity hardware" on a SDN product website. What does it really mean? Sometimes when Router Analysis gets a new piece of SDN software to test the results come out much better or worse than what the vendor claims. The most recent occurrence of lower performance happened as we st … [Read more...]
This article is the first in a set of articles that will walk through the evaluation of Midokura's MidoNet product. In the first article we will discuss Midokura's solution, what it is made of, how it works and what expectations have been set with regard to performance and the solution it aims to solve. An Overview of Midokura: SDN Startup Midokura launched this week at th … [Read more...]
How Does SDN Fit Into The Virtual Data Center? One thing that needs to be cleared up is the definition of Network or Networking Hardware. In the definition of SDN from ONF they discuss the decoupling of the Control and Data Plane with the Data Plane being defined as Network Hardware. Here is where things can get confusing. What is Network Hardware? Wikipedia says the fo … [Read more...]