As with NGN in the past, OpenFlow, Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies fuel the latest hype bubble in the networking industry and service provider environments. Based on vendor and industry press promises, and the well-published OpenFlow deployment with Google’s internal network, these technologies became an unavoidable boardroom discussion as service providers try to seek new revenue streams and optimize their costs. On the other hand, many engineers are left wondering what’s really going on behind the scenes and how useful these technologies might be in real-life networks. This 1-day event describes the technology fundamentals of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC), OpenFlow and NFV, their advantages and pitfalls, and the potential use cases including a brief overview of some existing deployments. The focus of the presentation is on real-life deployment scenarios and design discussions.
Network architects, designers and implementation engineers working in environments that are evaluating the viability or plan to deploy OpenFlow- or other SDN- or NFV-based solutions.
The Need for Software Defined Networking
Can you afford to deploy new applications in days or weeks when your competitors can do it in minutes? Are your developers satisfied with the time it takes to move a new application from development through QA and CA to production? Are you able to deploy new releases daily? Are you happy that your development teams prefer public cloud services over internal IT? If you’ve answered NO to at least one of the questions, it’s high time to put Software-Defined Data Center near the top of your priority list. The first part of the workshop focuses on technologies underlying SDN and NFV – OpenFlow, NETCONF, APIs, virtualization and virtual appliances.
Software defined networking is not a new technology – we’ve been using the concepts of programmable networks for decades. This section will describe numerous technologies you can use to program the network devices and try to answer the fundamental questions: When, Why and How should you program your network.
If you open a firewall, load balancer, WAN accelerator or almost any other network services appliance, you’ll find one or more x86 processors, standard GE/10GE NICs and some custom packet handling logic. Is there any reason we have to be tied to physical hardware? Wouldn’t it be better to deploy the same services in virtual machine format and make them flexible? That’s the fundamental concept of Network Function Virtualization. Does it really make sense to replace physical network services appliances with virtual machines? What are the benefits and drawbacks of NFV approach? This section will give you the answers you need to start evaluating applicability of NFV in your environment.
What do you get when you combine virtualized network services with programmable network elements? Highly flexible infrastructure that allows you to deploy, configure and migrate application stacks in minutes, not days or weeks. This section illustrates the concepts of Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) with a real-life example using VMware NSX/VSAN and Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform.
This section will describe the concepts of OpenFlow, a new protocol used to decouple control plane (topology discovery, path calculation…) from data plane (packet forwarding). It will cover the following topics:
Service providers and enterprises are already deploying SDN, using NETCONF, BGP or OpenFlow as the implementation technology. This section describes numerous use cases based on real-life deployments:
Ivan Pepelnjak, CCIE#1354 Emeritus, has been designing and implementing large-scale service provider and enterprise networks as well as teaching and writing books about advanced technologies since 1990. He’s the author of several Cisco Press books, prolific blogger and writer, occasional consultant, and creator of a series of highly successful webinars.