Openflow Trip

Nothing like back-to-back weeks of travel !   This week we're headed to Silicon Valley for a series of meetings related to Openflow including stops at Stanford University and HP Labs.  Actually, last week's trip to GEC7 at Duke University was related to Openflow as well.   If you haven't checked out Openflow yet, I'd encourage you to do so (www.openflowswitch.org).  It's a standard API that allows external systems (think PC servers) to manipulate the forwarding ASICs in switches and routers.  IU was recently awarded an NSF grant through the GENI program to help get Openflow deployed on campuses.

Heading to GEC 7

I'm heading to GEC 7, the 7th GENI Engineering Conference, tomorrow with several colleagues from the IU GlobalNOC.  IU has received multiple GENI grants so far including one for the Openflow Campus Trials which I'm working on along with the PI, Chris Small.  Tomorrow night we'll be doing a demo of our current Openflow deployment that includes 6 HP switches running Openflow capable code along with the NOX and SNAC Openflow controllers.  You can check out our project page on the GENI Wiki for more information.

Back in the Saddle Again !

Happy New Year !   Hopefully everyone enjoyed the holidays.  I hardly looked at email for 2 full weeks which was very nice !  

2010 promises to be as busy and eventful as 2009, if not more !  We are in the midst of two separate beta testing programs right now along with an RFP.  I'm actively working on two grant proposals, a major project to provide a more seamless networking experience across the Clarian (hospital) and IU facilities, and I'm trying to finish up a Legacy RSA with ARIN.  In all, my group has about 20 active projects on our plate right now !  

The Lab Experiment

I've mentioned our new testlab in a couple of tweets, so I thought I'd post some more information about what we're doing. The MDF in our new data center is quite spacious and well equipped. It includes 45 heavy-duty 2-post Panduit racks, overhead infrastructure for power cables, low-voltage copper cables (ie Cat5/6) and fiber, 36 inch raised floor and 1,800 AMPs of DC power. The production equipment is being built out from the front of the room toward the back, so we reserved the last couple of rows (10 racks total) for "test" equipment.

We've compiled a fair amount of equipment that can be used for testing and we also have a lot of equipment that moves through here to be "burned-in" and configured before it's sent into the field. All this equipment needs a place to live either temporarily or permanently. We have equipment from Ciena, Juniper, Infinera, Cisco, HP and others. Up until now it's be spread across several facilities, most of which had inadequate space, power and/or cooling. So we're very excited about having a wonderful new facility !

It's been amazing how much demand there is for this kind of testing environment. Equipment has been moved in quickly and as soon as people found out it was there, they wanted to use it. It's very clear that we'll need to designate a "lab czar" to make sure we maintain some semblance of organization in the lab - and it's clear that the lab czar better not be me ! The grand vision is to have a lab environment where engineers can "check out" specific devices, automatically build cross-connects between devices to create the topology they need and have the device configs reset to default when their work is completed. We're a long way from this, but will hopefully keep moving steadily in that direction over the next 12-24 months.

Yeah, we can do that !

Do you ever read about a new technology and go, "Man, that's so cool ! We should be doing that !". Only to be disappointed once you started digging into it a bit ?

That's exactly what happened to me after I read the following whitepaper...

Connecting to the Cloud with F5 BIG-IP Solutions and VMware VMotion

Some of you may have read my post a while back about how cool Application Delivery Controllers (aka load-balancers) are. Everything I said is probably true (note to self: reread that post and edit if necessary), but man, once you start digging into what you can do with one of those things - it strikes fear into the heart of every decent network engineer !

And now it looks like these things may bring us the holy grail of virtualization - live migration across a wide-area network ! I'm onboard !!

F5 demo'd this at VM World in late August and it's now late November. We have 4 brand new F5's that aren't in production yet, 2 in each of our data centers separated by about 60 miles. And we have plenty of VM's to throw into the mix. So I figured I'd download the configuration guide and see what it takes to set this up....oh, there's no configuration guide. Hmmm, maybe the documentation is on F5's devcentral site.....no. Okay, well our F5 sales engineer is coming in today so I'll just ask him....well he didn't have very many details and he referenced the documentation on their website...which of course I can't find. And what he did tell me made me realize just how many moving parts are involved and how complex the whole setup really is. Well, this could end up being really cool stuff, but it looks like it's not quite soup yet.

And then there's the issue of whether this is the right way to solve this problem. I'm left with the feeling that this is a really ingenious solution to a problem using the tools we already have but that what we really need are some new tools !

In our case we can theoretically bridge VLANs between our data centers since we have dark fiber. This would theoretically simplify things, but we haven't done this yet because of concerns about bridging loops and broadcast storms taking down BOTH of our data centers! If we could essentially route Ethernet MAC addresses using TRILL or similar functionality developed by the IEEE - perhaps that would offer a simpler solution to this problem !

What's up with IPv6 ?

I'm in Dearborn Michigan this week for the NANOG and ARIN meetings. NANOG = North American Network Operators Group. NANOG is very much like the Internet2 Joint Techs Workshops for the commercial sector. It's where network engineers get together to discuss cool new things they're doing. And, like most of these things, it's a lot about social networking - a chance to meet face-to-face with the people you email and IM with every day. ARIN = American Registry of Internet Numbers. ARIN is the non-profit that is responsible for handing out Internet number resources - primarily IP addresses.

IPv6 is a huge topic of discussion this week. Yahoo presented on their IPv6 roll-out which they completed last week. Comcast just presented on their deployment. Google has IPv6 deployed as well. I saw a news story last week that the number of ISPs requesting IPv6 addresses from ARIN has gone way up. In fact, in the last quarter (last month maybe) ARIN received more requests for IPv6 addresses than IPv4 addresses for the first time ever. It seems that IPv6 is *finally* getting some traction. My sense is that this is the real deal and IPv6 is really going to happen now.

It's funny though to see all the hype around IPv6 in the commercial sector. We rolled out IPv6 on the Internet2 network in 2000 and had IPv6 enabled on every data jack at IU around 2001. WRT IPv6, attending a NANOG in 2009 is much like attending an Internet2 Joint Techs Workshop in 2000 or 2001.

Duct work !

I remember the first time I was in a meeting about the deployment of a computer system and there were plumbers at the meeting ! Now there's more plumbing under the raised floors than anything else. Well, last week I got to work with the guys from the sheet metal shop while they fabricated duct work for our Cisco Nexus 7018 switches
. This turns the side-to-side airflow into front-to-back airflow. The sheet metal shop did a great job on very short notice !!






-- Post From My iPhone