Sunday, May 19, 2013

OpenDaylight


On April 15,  Gartner released a report titled "OpenDaylight Project Casts Cloud Over SDN Deployment".   Mark Fabbi and Joe Skorupa highlighted the following: "The OpenDaylight Project will likely delay the adoption of enterprise software-defined networking solutions and stifle innovation from smaller, SDN-focused startups with open SDN-based applications and related capabilities."




One month later on May 15, Cisco called out its "leadership in the OpenDaylight project" in the quarterly earning call.

Some people compared OpenDaylight with OpenStack.  Was Gartner telling us that OpenStack was formed to combat incumbents while OpenDaylight was formed to combat start-ups?  Interesting time for both incumbents and start-ups.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Traditional Network Vendors Advancing Switching

In the past few days, I've seen a lot of new product announcement from the switch vendors.  I am pasting a few Network World article links below as they cover the news quite well.  My overall impression is as follows:

  • Progress is impressive, but still very much a "speeds and feeds" game.  Density is ever more important in the "flat network" era.  Overall, the big differentiation is on the HDN not SDN.
  • When it comes to SDN, OpenFlow and OpenStack are important part of their story
  • HP finally has a virtual switch story with its 5900v after Cisco Nexus 1000V and IBM 5000v roll-out.  This is about 4-5 years behind the first mover.

Happy to hear your thoughts too?  Have a nice weekend,

-howie



Arista: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/050113-arista-269279.html
    . "The 7500E is a 30Tbps, 14 billion packets/sec non-blocking switch housed in the same 11 RU chassis as the 7500. Densities per chassis are 1,152 10G, 288 40G or 96 100G Ethernet."
    . $10k for each 100G!

HP: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/043013-hp-sdn-269254.html
    . "HP also unveiled a virtual switch to run under server hypervisors. The FlexFabric Virtual Switch 5900v supports the IEEE's Ethernet Virtual Bridging -- a.k.a. "VEPA" -- standard for offloading some switching capabilities from the server to a physical switch. The 5900v is optimized for VMware environments and supports mobility and management of network policies for virtual machines
configured through VMware hypervisors."
    . FlexFabric 5,900 ToR, added VEPA
    . FlexFabric 11,908 aggregation switch, 64 40G, OF1.3, 768 10G and
256 40G, TRILL/SPB
    . FlexFabric 12,900 core

Brocade: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/043013-brocade-data-center-269231.html
    . vRouter from Vyatte and OpenStack Plug-in

Juniper: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/032513-juniper-sdn-268073.html
    . EX9200 based on MX technology/asic, Juniper's 40/100G play (likely will limit Juniper's QFabric data center switch to 10G-only)

    . Separately they announced JunosV based on Contrail technology, leveraging XMPP.  Juniper is pushing XMPP into Open Daylight as well.

Cisco's Insieme Business Unit (no public announcement yet):
   . a fixed 36x40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) device;
   . a modular devices supporting 288 40G;
   . a modular devices supporting 576 40G;
   . a SND controller supporting those fabric switches