Is hardware turning soft? Yes, if you listen to IT vendors. Almost all IT technologies are pushing to direction being “software defined”. Software Defined Networking (SDN) — turning features that were once hardware into apps or part of the networking layer or running as apps on servers.
The Register article SDN’s dream: Use what you’ve got, not what you’re promised (Hardware acceleration – busted) is a good overview of the current situation in the software defined networking. It gives you the basic understanding of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) technologies. It gives you overview of the market situation today. At this point, SDN and NFV business is full of coldly calculated backstabbing, betrayal, politics, threats, partnerships, and blackmail. Everyone is jockeying for position and the name of the game is to create optics that say you’re open, friendly and supportive of your customers’ business needs while quietly working to kill off anyone that threatens your lock-in. For those interested in the “open” side of SDN this usually means Openflow based switches and Opendaylight as your SDN controller. Proprietary networking vendors try to downplay SDN offerings, but in most cases this whole “better in hardware” thing is rubbish.
So the future is that this:
Is more or less turning into this:
And vendors are still trying to catch you in their vendor lock games.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Use SDN to smash tier one ‘oligarchy’, hacker says
Toss DoS, stem MitM
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/09/use_sdn_to_smash_tier_one_oligarchy_hacker_says/
AusCERT IIX security bod David Jorm is urging users and organisations to adopt software-defined networking (SDN) to break up the ‘tier one networking oligarchy’.
The former Red Hat security bod said SDN establishes peer-to-peer interconnects without the expense and complexity of traditional models, using projects including OpenDaylight, ONOS, Cumulus, and the CloudRouter Project on which he works.
In the SDN primer given at the AusCERT conference on the Gold Coast last week Jorm says SDN can increase security postures, provided the SDN controller is properly protected, by eliminating threats such as man-in-the-middle and denial of service attacks.
“You end up with not only the tier one club … which is an oligarchy that you can’t join and are strongly disincentivised to let you join because it undermines their business, but there is nothing stopping you forming your own club,” Jorm says.
“So what are the security benefits of SDN? Yeah it’s cool, it’s lower latency, it’s probably cheaper … but routers could share information on active DDoSes (distributed denial of service attacks) meaning you no longer need volumetric defence.
Jorm says mesh networks are emerging where users are bypassing transit points altogether, and points out that carriers including PacNet are using it for production, while AARNET uses ONOS for its 15,000 route connections to the United States.
The technology separates the data and control network planes that are typically converged in routers such that the latter is factored out so that data plane devices do little else but forward packets.
Jorm’s CloudRouter Project offers a SDN kit launched April catering for Fedora, Docker, and OSv
OpenDaylight and friends spin up ‘CloudRouter Project’
Software-defined buzzword party sees SDN, NFV and DevOps merge to become ‘NetOps’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/01/opendaylight_and_friends_spin_up_cloudrouter_project/
Another day, another waft at the software-defined networking (SDN) and/or network function virtualisation (NFV) market, this time in the form of the new “CloudRouter Project” backed by CloudBees, Cloudius Systems, IIX, NGINX and OpenDaylight.
The latter you probably know – it’s the Linux Foundation’s effort to create a standard SDN and/or NFV stack. Cloudius is an Israeli effort to create a very lightweight OS for bare metal deployment, CloudBees is a continuous integration player, NGINX offers a web server and load balancer while IIX is a global peering company.
The group’s first effort is yours for the downloading here. The tool is based on Fedora and is said to offer the following features:
capability to run on public and private cloud infrastructures at scale with a fully-automated configuration system
container-ready, including support for Docker, Cloudius, OSv and KVM images
secure connectivity using standard-sbased IPSec VPN, SSL or L2TP
monitoring and reporting with integrated network protocol analysis for network detail at a fine-grained level
high availability and system redundancy with failover and synchronization
minimal resource consumption
The group reckons this approach “… provides DevOps for networks (NetOps) with the ability to easily deploy an integrated and hardened stack.”
CloudRouter
https://cloudrouter.org/getting-started/
The CloudRouter project aims to provide a variety of cloud-ready distribution formats, including disk images, Docker images and OSv images. The CloudRouter 1.0 beta release is currently available as a pre-configured disk image. To install it, follow the instructions below.
Two CloudRouter 1.0 Beta images are available: minimal and full. The minimal image is a Fedora Remix, with updates applied and the CloudRouter repo pre-configured. The full image also includes several pre-installed packages to support software-defined interconnect, such as Bird, Quagga, and OpenDaylight.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Likes Open Networks
No single standard seen for SDN
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326882&
Networking systems need to be more open both in their underlying hardware and use of open-source code, said a Facebook engineer at the annual Open Networking Summit here (June 15). His talk provided a practical reality check on the state of software-defined networks (SDNs) inside one of the world’s largest global data center networks.
Giant data centers need to solve complex problems by automating processes in software, but they don’t necessarily need a single standard protocol or applications programming interface to do it, said Omar Baldonado, head of the networking software team at Facebook.
“As you work on interfaces for devices, make them as open and low level as possible,” he told a gather of mainly network systems engineers. “Don’t get hung up trying to standardize on one northbound interface — most people have pulled away from that,” he said referring to work at the Open Networking Foundation on an interface for its Openflow protocol.
Network vendors should separate hardware from software to simplify the job of operating increasingly large global networks, said Baldonado.
“We want the flexibility to run whatever software we can develop or get on a box — all the software should not come from the vendor,” he said.
Network switch vendors should even make their hardware designs open source, something Facebook is driving with its own designs unveiled in March. “We hope that’s a trend that continues,” he said, noting Facebook releases schematic and Gerber files of its boards.
“We’ve avoided scaling out the team by automating the network,” he said.
The work started by automating tasks such as re-booting hardware or requesting carrier maintenance calls to deal with some of the 3.37 billion routine network notifications received in a typical month.
“The degree of difficulty of managing network systems often gets overlooked by vendors,” said Baldonado who worked for companies incuding Cisco and Avaya before joining Facebook.
The holy grail of a software-defined network (SDN) is more of a journey than a destination, Baldonado told attendees at the event focused on SDN. Facebook works with multiple versions of systems from different vendors and is now working on a third-generation of its overall data center architecture, he said.
“We don’t have one controller or one central app, but different controllers for diff parts of the network with different versions in flight,”
“For us, SDN isn’t just about having a separate control and data plane separate, its about applying as much automation and software as possible in the network – we’re going to write a lot of software, but I’m not sure what part should be called SDN,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The White-Boxing of Software-Defined Networking
White-box network router & switch providers pursue SDN
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326942&
A funny thing is happening to the router and switch market on its way to software-defined networking: it’s slowly but surely getting white-boxed.
White-box is a term that emerged in the 1990s to describe the variety of desktop PCs that were emerging from a host of small original design manufacturers (ODMs). The PCs were virtually identical in performance and software capabilities but were a fraction of the price of brand names such as IBM, HP, Dell and Compaq.
Similarly, the widespread adoption of software-defined network (SDN) standards has made white-box based network switches possible. The switches depend not on dedicated hardware for separate network functions, but on software-based network function virtualization (NFV) that allows creation of reprogrammable data paths that allow lightning fast reconfiguration of a variety of network elements.
This is all good news for single-board computer companies such as Taiwan-based Advantech and Austin, Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor, who are developing more powerful and flexible open-source network system solutions. The target is a switch and router market that up to now has been dominated by Intel’s X86 and IBM’s Power processors, and a handful of network system companies such as Arista, Brocade, Cisco and Juniper who dictated to their corporate customers what processors and software were to be used.
Now all that has changed, with competition coming in the form of white-box designs from single-board computer companies such as Advantech, Adlink, and Kontron, and ODMs such as Dell, Big Switch, Pica8, Quanta, and Salom, among others.
Rather than use proprietary software, they run on open-source software provided by either the board makers or original design manufacturers (ODMs) but sometimes by the semiconductor companies providing the silicon. White-box switches have much more diverse processor architectures. They’ve moved beyond total dependence on old standbys such as Intel’s x86 and now use processors such as MIPS and ARM, as well as a variety of SoC variations from the likes of Freescale, Broadcom, Cavium and Netronome.
Based on this new flexibility, Crehan Research believes that, with the total cloud market expected to grow to about 12-million-plus ports by 2017, white-box deployment will increase about 32 percent a year to about 5 million data-center Ethernet white-box switch ports by 2017.
According to Gartner Research, even though Cisco still dominates the switch/router market with a 50 percent share, the white-box segment is growing quickly. Now at 3.8 percent of the market, Gartner estimates white-boxes will constitute about 10 percent of the 18 million switch ports installed by 2018.
The use of white-boxes is also spreading to many medium to large corporations who have online cloud services to maintain. What they all want, in addition to raw performance, is low cost, cross-platform capabilities and ease of implementation that SDN and open source generally provide. They will use any network system supplier that will satisfy those requirements, regardless of the underlying processor architecture.
According to Paul Stevens, marketing director of the network and communications group at Advantech Corp., the board company started modestly in the network market in a few targeted segments closely related to their traditional industrial designs. “Now with SDN and the virtualization of network functions in software, our business there has exploded and we now have a diverse family of offerings using not only the X86, but network processor SoCs from the likes of Broadcom, Freescale, and Netronome.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Half of AT&T’s networks are controlled by open-source SDN code
Fun fact of the day, we think you’ll find
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/08/att_expanding_sdn/
AT&T says it has replaced nearly half of the software in its vast operations with open-source software-defined networking (SDN) code.
Speaking to developers just before this year’s CES conference kicked off on Tuesday, technology and operations veep John Donovan dropped that figure as evidence that the operator’s SDN strategy is working.
Donovan said there are now “millions” of AT&T wireless subscribers connected to virtualized network services – for example, many will be relying on the so-called AT&T Integrated Cloud (AIC), which is based on OpenStack.
The US telco ended 2015 with AIC deployed to 74 of its locations around the world, and has more than 275 businesses using it, we’re told. AT&T’s internal tools and the customer-facing applications share the same code in the cloud.
OpenStack and SDN doesn’t just mean the network as a whole is more resilient, since a failure in one zone doesn’t cascade to others: Donovan said the configurability in AIC also makes it much easier to design an implementation or service to meet local regulations.
SDN also helps the company “contain security threats better,” Donovan added.
While OpenStack is the most important of the SDN projects to AT&T’s current requirements, he said the company is also contributing to OpenNFV, OpenDaylight, and ONOS.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Networking vendors are good for free lunches, hopeless for networks
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/05/networking_vendors_are_good_for_free_lunches_hopeless_for_networks/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/05/networking_vendors_are_good_for_free_lunches_hopeless_for_networks/
Electronic Arts tech director thinks tech-agnostic developers can build better networks than slave-to-vendor NetAdmins
Fire your network administrators, hire developers instead, and stop expecting networking equipment vendors to provide anything more valuable than free lunches.
That’s the advice from games-maker Electronic Arts director of technical engagement Peyton Koran, who delivered a talk titled “The Impacts of Cloud Computing and Open Source on the Networking Industry” at the Future:Net conference that ran alongside last week’s VMworld 2017.
Peyton’s argument suggests that software development is now many organisations’ core competency, but that networking vendors require competency running their proprietary products. That in turn creates a need for procurement competency and licensing competency, even though they’re not the things that matter to a business. Buying in to proprietary networks also, he said, means users buy into a vendor’s approach to running networks, making the adoption of other technologies harder to contemplate or execute.
What does matter is new features that improve a network, but Koran said vendors only build those when a critical mass of clients request them. Using standards processes can create useful tech, he said, but only if you’re willing to wait years. Which nobody can. Rolling your own isn’t viable unless you operate at scale to compare with Facebook or Google.
Koran said most organisations are therefore stuck in a cycle whereby network vendors quote scarily high prices for equipment, then wheel in a senior sales person to placate and/or soothe shocked customers.
“Basically this ecosystem is great for steaks,” Koran told the conference to laughter an applause. “Most companies are realising this is not an ecosystem they want to be a part of any more.” They are instead looking for interoperable networks and are willing to pay more to get them as services running in the cloud.
The cloud’s a game-changer, he believes, because it doesn’t just replace appliances as a source of networking services, it also replaces the supposed secret sauce that networking vendors bake into ASICs and other closed hardware.
Koran believes the way forward is therefore to use a competency many organisations possess – running generic servers – and have software developers run them as part of a development effort that sees organisations build their own networking stacks, perhaps using community-contributed open-source code that shares useful functionality.