Current Situation of HP OpenFlow and Software Defined network strategy

In Interop 2012 in Las Vegas, I asked HP two questions: what is the current situation of HP OpenFlow and software-defined network strategy? What is the progress of the HP 12500 Series Data Center rack switch?

Fortunately, at the end of the meeting, I had the opportunity to communicate with Mike Nielsen, HP Network Solution sales director, who gave me some information. Here is what I know:

HP 12500 is planned to be updated early next year

You may have noticed that since the acquisition of 3Com more than two years ago, HP has barely updated the HP 12500 Series Data Center rack products. HP's biggest update to this platform is its intelligent elastic framework IRF ).

IRF is a vswitch virtualization technology that allows network engineers to virtualize multiple control panels of an HP 12500 switch. With this technology, you can manage multiple switches as one device, removing Spanning Tree Protocols and reducing operating costs. Last year, HP increased the number of switches that IRF can connect from two to four. In addition, IRF supports other vswitches. Now, with IRF, four 12500 switches can be connected together, or four HP top-level rack switches can be connected together.

In addition, HP has not updated the platform. In Interop last year, HP launched the HP 10500 series campus LAN core rack switch. At this year's conference, it launched a new module for this platform. What updates will HP 12500 perform next?

Nielsen acknowledges that HP has made a small number of updates to HP 12500 because it focuses primarily on using vswitches 10500 to update the campus core network. Hewlett-Packard believes there is a chance to catch up with Cisco. Cisco uses the new Supervisor 2 T engine to extend the life of Catalyst 6500 in the campus core network.

HP is making existing rack devices more powerful through new line cards and modules to update the HP 12500 platform. Nielsen declined to disclose details, but HP is likely to release these updates early next year.

At the same time, some hp customers may be interested in the NDA of the platform. For example, the customer DreamWorks Animation is deploying an HP data center network in its three primary data centers. Its core network consists of 12500. Derek Chan, global head of technical operations at DreamWorks, and Bethany Mayer, senior vice president of Hewlett-Packard and general manager of Hewlett-Packard networks, introduced the project at the Interop 2012 keynote conference.

In addition, Nielsen pointed out that "12500 is powerful. The number of servers deployed in most data centers ranges from 500 to 800. Our products can be expanded to thousands of servers ."

HP OpenFlow and software-defined network policy: Using vswitches as controllers

In her keynote speech, Mayer also introduced HP's Software Defined network vision program. She made it clear that the program focuses primarily on HP's new virtual Application Network (VAN) technology, but she did not mention HP OpenFlow.

VAN is actually a module of the HP Network Management System Intelligent Management Center (IMC). It uses pre-configured templates to set application delivery requirements, then, configure the 2-4 layer network infrastructure through the API to meet the delivery requirements. In addition, HP announced its cooperation with the application delivery Supplier F5 Networks to develop template-based network configurations for Layer 4 to Layer 7 Networks based on the F5 iApps framework.

HP and F5 are working together to implement an automated application distribution solution that supports Layer 2 to Layer 7 networks. So far, the cooperation results have been confirmed to support Microsoft Exchange, server virtualization and disaster recovery.

This technology can help network engineering abandon the CLI), allow them to use templates to quickly create networks for new applications and services, thus improving the network operation speed of highly virtualized data centers. However, Software Defined Network (SDN) works far more than that. It is not just a management network operation. It also abstracts the control panel and increases Network programmability. Therefore, it allows enterprises to deploy network-based applications on SDN controllers.

The SDN vision usually includes OpenFlow. In May February, HP solemnly announced that it would support this protocol in 16 HP switch templates. However, Mayer did not mention this in his keynote speech. Nielsen admitted that VAN is only part of the hp sdn strategy, but the other parts of the HP OpenFlow and SDN strategy are also under intensive development. IRF is called a control panel abstraction method, while supporting OpenFlow on 16 OpenFlow switches is another method.

Currently, the VAN module of IMC manages various network devices through APIS. It is not perfect, and it does not have many network-programmable functions. Nielsen imagined that IMC could eventually serve as an application that manages the network through an SDN controller.

Neilsen said: "In the end, we want the Management Panel to interact with the device through the Controller Interface. We want to implement it through OpenFlow, but we need to keep up with the industry and determine the industry needs. If you abstract APIs on a vswitch, you can use IMC to directly control these APIs, but this cannot be extended. We should use the Controller for management ."

So what can be used as a controller? Nielsen pointed out that HP can use its own vswitch as the controller. However, using a vswitch as the Controller may produce a single fault point. HP will solve this problem through IRF, build four switches into a cluster, and then use them as a distributed controller. In this architecture, the network administrator can define SDN streams which are generally implemented through IMC) and deploy other network applications, such as server Load balancer and network security, through the SDN controller. "It has been implemented. We have implemented this function on the wireless LAN control panel ."