Juniper contrail SDN Software stack to open source

According to foreign media reports, Juniper Network company in December last year to acquire 176 million U.S. dollars Software definition network (sdn,software tabbed receptacle) contrail Bae, and before that contrail company is not known to many people. Juniper Network launched its own SDN plan one months later, and released the beta code this May. Now that part of the code is ready for a formal launch, the Juniper Network has announced that it will be available to users in open source licensing mode.

For SDN projects and products, contrail can only be counted as a backup solution for a range of vendors like VMware (Nicira), Big Switch Network, Brocade Communications (Vyatta), HP, IBM, etc. In addition, the Opendaylight Alliance, made up of a number of companies, cannot be ignored, and they are working to assemble large quantities of code into a set of open source SDN stacks.

No matter from which project or the supplier, the SDN plan's goal is basically the same: the server provides the virtualization mechanism for the network system to provide storage solutions, thus changing the traditional network management of the fragile, pure physical and the Administrator's command line level requirements are too high.

Aruba's predecessor, CTO Ankur Singla, and Junos network operating System Chief architect and CTO Kireeti Kompella, jointly created Contrail BAE in early 2012. They have hired a large number of software engineers and internet experts from Cisco and Google to create a set of controllers compatible with the OpenFlow protocol developed by Stanford University. This set of controllers is based on existing network protocols, and therefore can be effectively compatible with current common switches, routers, and server virtualization management programs.

Bob Muglia, who worked for Microsoft and now the executive vice president of the company's software business, said in an interview that Contrail had planned to push the code to open source this year before accepting the acquisition.

"We have been working with a number of clients and hope that some of them will be involved in the actual production process in the fourth quarter of this year." "Muglia said. "We had planned to launch the product next year, but it turned out that the third quarter of this year was ready for the IPO – which was a bit surprising," he said. Usually, ' the second half of the year ' means to drag to December 31, which may also be related to my conservative personality. Members of the CONTRAIL technical team thought 2013 would definitely be a part of the results, but I still decided to set the date of the listing to 2014 years. However, the plan does not keep pace with the changes, and Juniper's acquisition has given some variables to the project, and we cannot postpone the planned progress of the product because of the addition of the Juniper Technology program. We've been hoping to get some results in the third quarter of this year, but it's certainly safer to be conservative on the date of the listing. In short, Contrail achieved their own commitment, and according to my experience, this is not a regular situation. ”

The contrail controller that will be put on the market is not much different from the version delivered a few months ago. The control mechanism is based on the Boundary Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is, of course, embedded in the switches and routers of juniper and other competing vendors.

It also employs XMPP, a messaging protocol designed specifically for middleware messages, designed to control virtual switches in virtual machine management programs. The "Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)" technology used is derived from the telecommunications network, which can compress and control the network packets and forward them after categorization; MPLS is between the two and three layers of the network stack.

The Contrail Controller also uses other protocols to partition the data layer in the switch stack with the control layer, making the two more adaptable. For the moment, however, it cannot support the OpenFlow protocol.

"We have not supported OpenFlow in the first version," Muglia points out. "In fact, we need to see how openflow can improve the online world," he said. In the current use environment, people will be more openflow in the passive way to the terminal area, and we want to be more proactive technical approach to solve the problem. And at present, this is the technology industry's general consensus and development direction. Providing support for the agreement is not difficult, and we are now supporting hundreds of juniper and contrail agreements, so bringing openflow into the game is not a problem--the key is that we need to consider which environments need to adopt openflow. In short, the corresponding use of the environment is the key to determine the fate of OpenFlow. ”

Contrail divides all kinds of network environment into four control layers--management, service layer, control layer and forwarding layer, which centralize some functions into the controller, and provide some other functions for the switches and routers in the network environment.

The biggest difference between the OpenFlow controller and the contrail is that contrail will save the master copy of the forwarded list in the controller and copy it to the switch side. By contrast, the OpenFlow controller stores the master copy in the switch and aggregates it into the controller after its content has changed.

The Contrail controller is written by C + +, so it is closer to the device itself, and its user interface is written using Python. The whole stack also uses Cassandra Distributed hash table database to realize the real-time analysis of network traffic, and the data stored in the analysis engine can be exported to Hadoop or time series database to realize further analysis.

The Contrail controller works seamlessly with KVM, Xen two virtual machine management programs and supports cloud combinations such as OpenStack and Cloudstack. The controller is now certified to operate in the Juniper MX boundary router, ex modular switch, and QFX top switch.

Juniper's Contrail controller uses a very simple pricing rule: a permanent license for each server slot is $1700, and each network component in the management system asks for 1700 dollars. (most importantly, you need to pay extra for maintenance every year.) Of course, you can also choose the subscription mode, each year for 1000 dollars per slot, or 1000 dollars per network component, this fee has included the annual maintenance costs.

Interestingly, Juniper also incorporated the Contrail controller into the list of open source projects in the Www.opencontrail.org Web site, and the commercial and open source editions were identical in terms of the code content, Muglia said. There is no "open core" concept in the world. The controller code follows the Apache 2.0 license, and Muglia that the focus is on the ability of the controller to combine the code with the same OpenStack and cloudstack that are based on the Apache 2.0 license. Juniper also announced a partnership with IBM, and the blue giant will integrate contrail with his own smartcloud orchestrator. Of course, the so-called SmartCloud orchestrator is also its own OpenStack distribution.