OpenFlow opens up a new situation for network applications

Bkjia.com exclusive translation] the new network traffic management protocol has been demonstrated and can be applied in practice. With the promotion of industry institutions, the new routing protocol OpenFlow will provide users with unprecedented management methods to reduce their necessary work intensity in terms of network control.

OpenFlow uses a software-defined network activity. That is to say, you can ignore the specific circumstances of the underlying hardware, define the traffic directly, and set the way in which the traffic passes through the network. Last month, this idea was widely recognized by many big-name vendors, the founder of the open network foundation, and decided to put the agreement into practice.

OpenFlow is an open-source project that carries the research achievements made by Stanford University in six years of cooperation with UC Berkeley. OpenFlow can extract and control network traffic from basic devices, such as vswitches and vrouters, and then forward it to the relevant applications of the network owner, individual users, or individual users. This feature helps you develop application policies to identify which lines are crowded, where latency or congestion is low, and where there are fewer hops.

Although OpenFlow does work, it does not bring revolutionary progress as some may imagine, Scott Shenker said, he is one of the founding members of the OpenFlow project, he is also an associate professor at UC Berkeley. "This technology does not allow you to perform any operations that could not have been completed on the network," Shenker said. "But it provides us with a programming interface-this interface allows everyone to program the network to operate as we want, for example, how to route data packets, how to handle load balancing, and how to set access control. In short, it breaks the established rules that have been bound to us and allows us to define the operation methods we want in turn. "

"It allows us to create and run a multi-customer shared network," said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst from the Yankee Group. "It is not just a virtual LAN (VLAN); it provides a real virtual network system. "

Kerravala says the open source features of OpenFlow allow users to verify the effect. Of course, it also allows you to quickly create and introduce new features and functions, and customize the network to meet specific application requirements. For example, you can use OpenFlow to disable unused connections and switch ports to reduce power consumption.

OpenFlow has a large number of supporters. You can see the list of the project's founding development teams at a glance. The founding members were from German Telecom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, Yahoo, and other big-name enterprises. The subsequent developers were from Cisco, brocade, Juniper Networks, HP, and Broadcom, ciena, Riverbed Technology, Force 10, Citrix, Dell, Ericsson, IBM, Marvell, NEC, Netgear, NTT and VMware.

Brocade will apply OpenFlow Technology on its switch products later this year, said Ken Cheng, vice president of the product service supply department of the company. The company is working on a technology that provides management services for "ultra-large scale" data centers with hundreds of cabinets. Brocade is also evaluating the possibility of using OpenFlow as a wide area network traffic management tool to provide solutions for the virtualization control of data centers.

"We may face millions of MAC addresses from the virtual machine perspective," said Cheng. "This scale is beyond the scope of any reasonably constructed switch. "

Some of brocade's competitors and R & D personnel involved in the OpenFlow project are not optimistic about the system. Before applying OpenFlow to its own products, Force 10 still intends to wait for its technology to mature, said Arpit Joshipura, chief marketing officer of the company.

"We must ensure that all those specifications that are not scalable are extended," Joshipura said. "Large network applications are now more focused on innovation than traditional enterprises. "

Outsiders who did not participate in the OpenFlow project still believe that the product may be the same.

"As early as the 1990s S, we had a 'lab 'on such network architecture ideas. At that time, we tried to use a VNS called SecureFast, that is, a virtual network server) to centrally set network traffic, "Markus Nispel said. He is the chief technology strategist of kichuang communications, a subsidiary of Siemens. "Due to some scalability problems, this project will end when it releases a product/architecture named SecureFast. This product uses a system called 'distributed traffic setting', and uses the connection-oriented switchover and forwarding mechanism 'level 2 Open Shortest Path prepa' as its topology protocol. The overall solution... It was officially applied to the second-level network deployment field in 1996. "

"Here we mainly focus on how to set traffic," Nispel said. "10G Ethernet can provide users with up to 15 million data traffic per second on each port. How can external systems cope with such huge traffic? Of course, we also have an internal hardware auxiliary system to help with management. But all in all, the external system's processing capabilities will undoubtedly face challenges. "

However, kictron is exploring a hybrid processing method, that is, identifying and tracking application traffic only through external systems, Nispel said. With the rise of cloud services, the security requirements for intelligence and traffic visualization have been further improved, which forces the principle of applications and the advancement of the services they provide to be strengthened.

But Nispel believes that OpenFlow is more like a service supply or a dedicated Data Center Protocol for enterprises than a general management mechanism. For enterprises, they already have enough inherent protocols for reference, he said. Adding the new OpenFlow mechanism will make the problem more complicated and confusing.

"I have seen a lot of well-established VLAN-like virtual LAN), VRF multi-Virtual Path forwarding), MPLS Multi-Protocol Label Switching) and GRE General Routing Encapsulation) this path pattern, "he said. "Of course we can add OpenFlow, but does this really make it easy? I can't see that OpenFlow-based solutions are easier to deploy than the above systems. "

The easy deployment method comes with a programmable protocol, says Shenker of Berkeley University.

"The user uses scripts to control the way the switch works, and in the same way, we can control any way of working in programming. "Shenker said. "Technology is no longer a problem at all; it only gives us control in the form of programming. After you gain control over the network, any specific needs can be met. "

However, programming has also encountered problems in the past, because the degree of functional control panels opened by suppliers on their routers and switches is different. Programmability is only available for specific devices of specific vendors, Shenker said.

The OpenFlow project, as a medium, ensures that this programmability works smoothly and is easy to use in access to various network devices from different vendors.

"To achieve this goal, we need to develop specifications for OpenFlow," Shenker said. "This specification requires standard entities with industry influence for promotion. At present, only a few suppliers have joined, but more suppliers will join by the end of this year. "

Other analysts generally believe that external programming on routers and switches through OpenFlow and SDK software-defined networks can help IT enterprises better manage their data centers. Alan Shimel published an article titled "OpenSource Fact and Fiction open-source reality and hypothesis, it is pointed out that OpenFlow can make it easier for users to eliminate traffic exceptions caused by hardware faults.

"It can also be used to shut down underutilized devices to save power consumption," Shimel says in his blog.

He pointed out that with the increasing support from manufacturers, the chances of success for this project seem to be quite high. But Shimel also pointed out that many other widely supported standards in the past are still not successful.

"Microsoft and Cisco are even well-known initiators of the 'embracing and extending communication and expansion 'standard, but they have never been able to make the solution work globally," Shimel said in his blog. "In any case, despite the numerous outstanding but failed cases before OpenFlow, I still have a lot of confidence in this project, at least I personally hope it will succeed. "

At the end of last year, OpenFlolw demonstrated its implementation and started its vswitch, Big Switch Network, at the ninth Global Network Innovation Project Conference (GEC9) held in Washington ), recently, we received another $14 million sponsorship fund.

An open-source switch company named Pica 8 also plans to apply OpenFlow to its data center and cloud computing environment. These two fields can immediately benefit from the new features brought about by OpenFlow, Shenker said, Because virtual machines are increasingly widely used in these environments.

"Because the data center brings endless pain to the technical staff, it will become the first place to log on to OpenFlow," he said. "In this field, this technology will soon play its desired effect and become indispensable. "

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