Thursday, April 2, 2015

ONOS Blackbird Focuses on SDN Control Plane Performance and Scale

A new version of the Open Network Operating System (ONOS), named Blackbird, has been released (the first version of ONOS was out in December 2014).

ONOS features a highly available, scalable SDN control plane featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control, and service applications across mission critical networks. It is architected as a distributed but logically centralized control plane to achieve high performance, scale-out and high availability. ONOS' high availability characteristics include full recovery from events such as switch and link failure, node failure, entire ONOS cluster failure, single node cluster failure, cluster partitioning and device-node communication failure.

The ONOS Blackbird release defines the following set of metrics to effectively measure performance and other carrier-grade attributes of the SDN control plane.

Performance Metrics
Topology – link change latency
Topology – switch change latency
Flow operations throughput
Intent (Northbound) install latency
Intent (Northbound) withdraw latency
Intent (Northbound) reroute latency
Intent (Northbound) throughput

Scalability
Ability to scale control plane by adding capacity

High Availability
Uninterrupted operation in the wake of failures, maintenance and upgrades

ONOS aims to achieve extremely high target numbers of 1,000,000 flow operations per second and less than 100 ms (and ideally under 10 ms) latency. Most of ONOS Blackbird release's measurements meet these targets; the ones that do not will continue to be optimized in the coming releases and in conjunction with use case and deployment requirements.

The Blackbird release also addresses the challenge of effectively determining "the carrier-grade quotient" of the SDN control plane. Metrics currently used to measure performance, including simplistic ones such as "Cbench," do not provide a complete or accurate view of the SDN control plane capabilities thereby highlighting the need for a more indicative set of measurements.

"Achieving the high availability required to deliver network resilience at the necessary scale without compromising performance as you add controller instances has been an elusive goal for open source SDN solutions and a barrier to adoption—until now," said Guru Parulkar, Executive Director for ON.Lab.  0"Architected as a distributed system, ONOS is the first open source SDN solution to achieve linear scale-out while maintaining high performance and availability. As the size of your network grows, ONOS instances can be added to scale the SDN control plane, and seamlessly deliver the needed throughput. This ability not only breaks down barriers to real-world deployment but also future-proofs your network."

A comprehensive explanation of these metrics and Blackbird performance assessment using these metrics is published on the ONOS wiki at http://bit.ly/1GhIr3X

http://onosproject.org/


Video: Guru Parulkar on the Strategic Vision of ONOS

The strategic vision of ONOS is simple - to build a scalable, high-available, high-performance network operating system for Service Provider networks, says Guru Parulkar, Executive Director of ON.Lab. Here he gives an update of how this open community effort fits in with the ambition of network operators.

See video:  https://youtu.be/ilKSkCK91U8

 

Video: Evolving Transport Networks for Clouds

TeliaSonera International Carrier is already seeing a major impact from cloud traffic, says Mattias Fridström Vice President, Technology.  Much of it is driven by the enormous flows between the mega data centers of the big cloud providers.

Topics in this interview include:

1:04 - Does traffic from cloud services tend to be aggregated in big hubs?
1:44 - Has the market for 100G transport developed as expected?
2:39 - Who is buying 100G interfaces today?
3:13 - Do you provide wavelength or dark fiber as well?
4:03 - Hot trends at #OFC2015

See video:  https://youtu.be/lGfowCF6gvI

FCC to Consider Spectrum Sharing in 3.5 GHz Band

The FCC upcoming open meeting on April 17 will consider ways to leverage spectrum sharing technologies to make 150 megahertz of contiguous spectrum available in the 3550-3700 MHz band for wireless broadband and other uses, as part of a Citizens Broadband Radio Service.

http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-announces-tentative-agenda-april-open-meeting-2

Dell'Oro: Strong Dollar to Have Big Impact on Telecom CAPEX

Telecom operators around the world invested heavily in their fiber and LTE networks during 2014 resulting in a fourth consecutive year of Capex growth as advancements in mobile related spending offset declining wireline investments. However, the strength of the dollar could wipe out $20 billion in telecom Capex in 2015, according to a newly published Carrier Economics report by Dell’Oro Group.

“We have not made any major changes to our constant currency Capex projections for 2015 and continue to expect the market will grow at a low-single-digit pace in 2015 driven primarily by China and Europe,” said Stefan Pongratz, Dell’Oro Group Carrier Analyst. “But in U.S. Dollar terms, assuming rates remain at current levels, the strengthening U.S. Dollar will unequivocally impact Telecom Capex, and we have revised our 2015 Capex in U.S. Dollar terms downward rather significantly to adjust for currency fluctuations,” continued Pongratz.

http://www.DellOro.com

Telstra to Sell IBM's SoftLayer Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Telstra will sell IBM's SoftLayer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform from IBM. Under the agreement, Telstra customers will have access to SoftLayer’s highly secure and agile cloud infrastructure.

IBM recently opened new data centres in Melbourne and Sydney.

“Telstra customers will be able to access IBM’s hourly and monthly compute services on the SoftLayer platform, a network of virtual data centres and global points-of-presence (PoPs), all of which are increasingly important as enterprises look to run their applications on the cloud. SoftLayer is a platform that lets businesses quickly migrate, build, test, and deploy their applications and innovations,” said Erez Yarkoni, Telstra’s Chief Information Officer and Executive Director of Cloud.

http://www.telstra.com.au/aboutus/media/media-releases/ibm-and-telstra-join-forces-to-offer-softlayer-cloud-platform.xml

CyrusOne Buys New Data Center in Austin

CyrusOne will purchase an additional powered shell in Austin’s Met Center, creating what is expected to be its largest facility in Austin at 172,000 total square feet of shell and offering 120,000 colocation square feet (CSF), with up to 12 megawatts of power, and over 25,000 square feet of class A office space at full build.

CyrusOne’s new Austin III data center will use the company's "Massively Modular" design engineering approach to optimize materials sourcing and enable delivery of industry-leading energy optimization and just-in-time data hall inventory to meet customer demand. The first phase of construction includes up to 60,000 square feet of CSF and 6 megawatts of critical load.

“Based on current and projected customer demand, it was essential to expand in this market. We’ve been extremely successful and have seen a tremendous amount of growth in Austin,” said John Hatem, senior vice president, data center design and construction, CyrusOne. “Once this facility is complete, enterprise-level companies will be able to utilize our Massively Modular design capabilities to scale rapidly and efficiently while taking advantage of CyrusOne’s exceptional uptime delivered by redundant power, cooling, and connectivity infrastructure.”

http://www.cyrusone.com/