Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Launching Open.ConvergeDigest.com -- An Open Networking Showcase

Tuesday, June 16, 2015  , , , , , , ,  

by James E. Carroll

We're pleased to announce the launch of our mini-website on Open Networking.

This sub-domain of the Converge! Digest site showcases top ideas and technology demonstrations related to SDN, NFV, Open Stack, Open Daylight, Open Flow, ONOS, OPNFV, Open vSwitch, Open Computer and other open source efforts aimed at making networking more agile, programmable, scalable and lower cost.

Our series kicks off with short videos from top insiders sharing their views on how Open Networking initiatives are changing the course of the industry:





Got an idea for this series?  Please contact Jim Carroll 

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Internet2 Deploys ONOS to Provision Virtual Nets

Tuesday, June 16, 2015  , , ,  

Internet2 has deployed the Open source SDN Network Operating System (ONOS) on its nationwide research and education (R&E) network.

Five higher education institutions — Duke University, Florida International University, the Indiana GigaPoP, MAX and the University of Maryland – College Park, and the University of Utah — are connected to a virtual slice of the Internet2 nation-wide network that is piloting this next-generation advanced network technology.

Internet2 said it is using the capabilities of its SDN substrate to provision virtual networks based on FlowSpace Firewall. An ONOS cluster is deployed in a virtual network slice on the Internet2 network, controlling 38 OpenFlow-enabled Brocade and Juniper switches. The SDN-IP Peering application deployed atop ONOS peers with other, traditional networks. An SDN-based network like Internet2 provides benefits such as network programmability, lower TCO and removal of vendor lock-in. In this particular case, the centralized control plane leads to significant improvements in network operation efficiency for the Internet2 network.

“We worked closely together in a lab environment to prepare ONOS for production deployment on the Internet2 Network, providing many valuable insights on production deployment of SDN-controlled virtual networks in a multi-tenant environment,” said Luke Fowler, director of software and systems for the GlobalNOC.

“A primary feature of the Internet2 Network is its ability to serve as a ‘playground’ for piloting new advanced networking capabilities in a real-world environment with demanding users and advanced applications capabilities,” said Vietzke. “The ONOS and SDN-IP peering deployment is another demonstration of how Internet2 and the academic community continue to be a large scale platform in which pre-market innovations can be prototyped at scale.”

"ON.Lab, the ONOS Project and Internet2 have a very synergistic collaboration. At ON.Lab we develop interesting open source SDN platforms and Internet2 is a keen early adopter bringing new capabilities to its customers,” said Bill Snow, vice president of Engineering for ON.Lab. “With the deployment of ONOS on Internet2’s nationwide network, we get to validate and demonstrate ONOS’s scalability, performance and high availability in a production setting and learn from this experience to make ONOS better.”

http://www.internet2.edu/news/detail/8664/

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Corsa Introduces SDN Metering and QoS for Big Data

Tuesday, June 16, 2015  , , , , ,  

Corsa Technology, a start-up based in Ottawa, unveiled new SDN metering and QoS (Quality of Service) capability for its line of performance SDN hardware. Bandwidth reservation is seen as especially interesting for organizations running Big Data workloads.

The traffic engineering function, which is based on OpenFlow 1.3, allows network architects to better manage bandwidth across their network with dynamic, policy-aware metering and QoS. Metering and queuing allows networks to create bandwidth profiles by putting limits and guarantees on traffic with particular classes.

Corsa said the advantage With SDN is that bandwidth limits are no longer fixed as part of a static topology and rigid hardware platform. Policy-aware provisioning can be dynamically pushed down to the flexible Corsa SDN hardware to make on-going adjustments to meters and queue assignments. The network can then make immediate, informed queuing and discard decisions under congestion. Real-time performance monitoring automatically returns meter statistics and is checked against policy such as SLAs. For network operators including service providers and ISPs, SDN metering and queuing allows new self-serve features to be offered such as “bandwidth reservation” where users can dynamically schedule and reserve bandwidth via separate class of service and meters.

“Dynamic, policy-driven networks is what SDN is about and SDN hardware solutions must be able to respond to these policy changes. SDN metering and QoS functionality is one important area for policy-driven networking requiring a very capable hardware solution,” said Yatish Kumar, Corsa Technology CTO. “Corsa’s line of performance SDN hardware has deep packet buffers, multi-table datapaths, and can support over a million active flows with flow modifications updated at >50,000 flow mods/sec. Together, these attributes make Corsa SDN metering and QoS a powerful tool for creating granular bandwidth profiles.”

http://www.corsa.com/corsa-technology-announces-sdn-metering-and-qos/

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Huawei and Vodafone Alliance Targets Global Enterprise Market

Tuesday, June 16, 2015  , ,  

Huawei and Vodafone announced a new strategic alliance focusing on the enterprise market in Europe, Asia Pacific and Africa.

The companies will work together on the development of a variety of enterprise communications and technology services for global enterprise customers, including solutions that use Huawei’s fixed and mobile connectivity bonding technology, in-building coverage solutions, Machine-to-Machine module designs, and solutions for Safe City, Internet of Things, and cloud data centers.

Vodafone Group Enterprise, Chief Executive, Nick Jeffery, said, “We have worked with Huawei across various parts of our business and this agreement to focus on the enterprise market is an important evolution. There is an opportunity for us both to bring our expertise to bear on some of the key challenges in the enterprise market.”

Mr. Yan Lida, President, Enterprise Business Group, Huawei, said, “Now, many enterprises realize that technology-led transformation is necessary for companies to stay competitive, and improve operational efficiency and performance. Huawei is pleased to extend our long-standing relationship with Vodafone to establish a new agreement. We aim to carry out joint innovations, integrate our ICT expertise and global resources, help customers cope with challenges and opportunities brought by the new industrial revolution, and push ICT transformation in the industry.”

http://www.huawei.com

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Cavium Shows New Xpliant Silicon Driving SDN-enable Ethernet Switches

Tuesday, June 16, 2015  , , , ,  

Cavium is demonstrating OpenFlow and OpenFlow-Hybrid Ethernet switches based on its new XPliant silicon.

Cavium's XPliant Ethernet switches deliver full line rate support in OpenFlow through XPliant's SDK APIs and integration of Open vSwitch (OVS) at an aggregate switching capacity of 3.2 terabits per second.

"Historically, large scale data center customers were only interested in the speeds and feeds of networking silicon. Now customers are looking for standards based vendor interoperable features that enable them to effectively control their networks, scale and grow over time," said Eric Hayes, VP/GM, Switch Platform Group at Cavium. "The XPA architecture is the ideal solution available today with all of these capabilities simultaneously in a cost effective manner."

Cavium noted its XPliant packet architecture XPA Software APIs expose the OVS control abstractions, enabling users to benefit from OVS rich management and networking features, such as L2 pipeline (VLANs, LAGs, FDB, STP etc.), bonding modes (LACP), and advanced tunneling protocols (Geneve, VxLAN, NVGRE) as well as future yet-to-be-defined standards. Now, through XPA Software and APIs, these open and industry proven features can be seamlessly invoked representing a truly hybrid switch optimized for virtualized environments, in a single hardware.

http://www.cavium.com



  • In September 2014, Cavium made its entrance into the merchant Ethernet switching silicon market with the launch of its programmable XPliant Packet Architecture and chips. The technology for this new product line originates with XPliant, a Silicon Valley start-up that Cavium agreed to acquire in July.  The new products target switches for cloud / enterprise data centers and service provider infrastructure, for both top-of-rack and backbone applications.
    The company said its design approach with its XPliant Packet Architecture was to take the dedicated function blocks present in conventional Layer 2 switching silicon and replace then will a flexible Table Type structure that enables software personalities to dictate the exact operation to be performed – for packet parsing, table look-ups, packet re-writes, fabric scheduling, and statistics and counters – without impacting performance. The company said its design fits well with the spine/leaf architecture of scale-out data centers.

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Accton Contributes Open Switch Software to ONF’s Atrium

Tuesday, June 16, 2015  , , , ,  

Accton Technology has contributed switch software to Atrium, the Open Network Foundation’s new open source SDN distribution for OpenFlow-based SDN deployments.

Specifically, Accton’s contribution to ONF’s Atrium distribution enables the use of Edge-Core open network switches in OpenFlow-based SDN deployments.

With the first release of Atrium, an SDN network can be deployed using Edge-Core switches communicating via the OpenFlow v1.3 protocol to the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) SDN controller running a BGP peering application based on Quagga. The Accton contribution consists of the following open source software components, which were integrated, ported and validated by Accton on the Edge-Core AS5710-54X 10GbE top-of-rack switch, the first switch hardware design fully approved by the Open Compute Project (OCP):


  • Open Network Linux, the OCP-approved reference NOS;
  • OpenFlow Data Plane Abstraction (OF-DPA), developed by Broadcom and implementing an OpenFlow hardware abstraction layer;
  • Indigo OpenFlow client.
  • Accton will continue working with ONF’s Atrium project by enhancing the Accton contribution to support Edge-Core’s 40GbE and 100GbE open network switches, and by supporting the next release of Atrium running on the OpenDaylight SDN and NFV software platform.

Accton also announced that it will make available open switch software distributions with additional features to enable customers, data center operators, software providers and the open source community to develop software applications to automate and control networks deploying Accton’s Edge-Core open network switches. The open switch software distribution will consist of the following open source software elements, packaged and validated by Accton on the Edge-Core 10GbE, 40GbE, and 100GbE open network switches:

  • Open Network Linux, the OCP-approved reference NOS;
  • OpenFlow Data Plane Abstraction (OF-DPA), developed by Broadcom and implementing an OpenFlow hardware abstraction layer;
  • Indigo OpenFlow client;
  • OpenNSL, contributed by Broadcom and implementing an open API to the Broadcom StrataXGS switch silicon which is designed into the Edge-Core OCP switches;
  • FBOSS Agent, contributed by Facebook to provide an interface to control Broadcom switch silicon and manage low-level control packets.

“Cloud providers and enterprises with web-scale infrastructures want greater automation and control over their networks through the use of open software platforms,” said Jeff Catlin, VP Technology, Accton Technology Corporation. “With our contributions to ONF’s open source SDN distribution and with Accton’s distribution of open switch software, we are enabling an ecosystem of customers, cloud providers, software companies, and the open source community to add value on top of our OCP-approved Edge-Core switches to deploy SDN and NFV architectures that meet those needs.”

http://www.accton.com


  • Last week, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced its "Atrium" open SDN software distribution, integrating previously standalone open source components. Atrium, which will be released by the end of the month, incorporates the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the Open Network Operating System (ONOS), and Open Compute Project (OCP) components. The software elements run in either controllers or switches, communicating via the OpenFlow protocol, and include plugin opportunities for other switching solutions to help foster an open ecosystem of interoperable, hardware-based OpenFlow switches.

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IBM Opens Softlayer Cloud Data Center in Milan

Tuesday, June 16, 2015  , , , ,  

IBM has opened its first cloud data center in Cornaredo, a municipality in the Province of Milan, Italy.

The new IBM Cloud center, powered by SoftLayer infrastructure, allows customers and partners adopting cloud computing to more easily manage, run, and store data and workloads Italy, key for many local clients in regulated industries.

The IBM Cloud data center in Milan joins existing SoftLayer EMEA cloud centers in London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam and connects to IBM Cloud’s growing network of facilities around the world. From the new location, connections to SoftLayer services within Europe are less than 30 milliseconds, which means data can be transmitted quickly—key for a wide range of computing needs, including real-time bidding (RTB), big data, and analytics applications.

“The Italian IT sector is changing as startups and enterprises alike are increasingly turning to the cloud to optimize infrastructure, lower IT costs, create new revenue streams, and spur innovation,” said Marc Jones, chief technology officer for SoftLayer, an IBM Company. “The Milan data center extends the unique capabilities of our global platform by providing a fast, local onramp to the cloud. Customers have everything they need to quickly build out and test solutions that run the gamut from crunching big data to launching a mobile app globally.”

http://www.softlayer.com/Milan

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AirTight Networks Appoints New CEO

Tuesday, June 16, 2015  , , ,  

AirTight Networks, which specializes in enterprise, cloud-managed Wi-Fi, named Rick Wilmer as its new CEO. Prior to joining AirTight as COO in December 2014, Wilmer served as CEO of Leyden Energy and was an executive-in-residence at Lightspeed Venture Partners. He previously served as CEO of Pliant Technology (acquired by SanDisk) and as COO of Santur Corporation. Prior to that he was head of business operations at Aruba Networks, from its early days through its IPO in 2007. Wilmer also served in executive engineering and operations roles at 2Wire, Seagate and Maxtor.

AirTight also appointed Kester Kyrie to the position of vice president of worldwide sales and channels.

"I am extremely pleased with the executive team we have assembled, which positions us well to continue our growth and expand our presence in the global Wi-Fi market," said Wilmer. "2015 will be a transformative year for AirTight in terms of market expansion, sales growth and product innovation. Kester and I, along with our remarkable engineering team, will help ensure that we make the absolute most of the opportunities that lie ahead of us. We intend to do some spectacular things this year by driving our industry away from the old, expensive and complicated controller-based Wi-Fi to a completely new generation of cloud-based Wi-Fi that supports scalability and ease of use beyond anything that's out there today -- all with the very best wireless security."

http://www.airtightnetworks.com

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