SDN in Transport/IP Networks?!

Ping Pan, Ph.D. September 2013

The Paradigm Shift: the separation of control-plane and data-plane

Applications and Services

Physical Storage Physical Processors Physical Networks

Physical Storage Physical Processors Physical Networks

Physical Storage Physical Processors Physical Networks

Physical Storage Physical Processors Physical Networks Physical Networks

Virtualized Networks

OR… IS THIS FOR REAL?

Can make network BIGGER…

Can make service deployment FASTER…

Can make network operation SIMPLER…

Can virtualize network devices and make them CHEAPER

Incumbent: my SDN is BETTER than yours!

Confusion… over Transport SDN

Bigger? Optical transport networks can get bigger without SDN

Fact: Wavelength demand has increased 500% since 2004, while revenue growth is far less Claim #1: SDN is about scaling up networks (packet, optical, enterprise, data center and backbone) as a whole. Considering optical transport network SDN in isolation makes no sense!

Faster? Existing network architecture is the bottleneck for slow service deployment

Claim #2: Sorting out inter-networking interfaces as “NNI’s” makes no sense. We need to virtualize the network as a whole, and run IP services in an Over-The-Top (OTT) manner

Simpler? Don’t look for standard bodies to help you

IETF: • The routing infrastructure is

getting more complex each everyday

ITU: • OTU/ODU is not for dummies

neither

ONF: • Multi-tables in OpenFlow…

really?

Claim #3: We are not making networking simpler through standard bodies

Virtualization in storage and computing: • Definition: Take commodity x86 servers, represent them as uniform resources,

and utilize them for efficiency

• Goal: efficiency in utilization

• Means: commodity hardware

Reality in networking: • High-performance networking ASIC’s are all different in behavior and properties

• Transport gears don’t need to inter-op (including date encoding) to get deployed in Tier1 networks

• The driver behind transport efficiency is in packing advanced functions and features, and has little to do with commodity hardware

Claim #4: Virtualizing of network components makes no sense. The name of the game is in virtualizing the networks in terms of throughput, delay and protection capability, and provide programming interfaces.

What does VIRTUALIZATION mean?

Incumbent’s Notion of SDN: …make sure it’s called OpenXYZ

Router Networks

SDN

OpenFlow? Why stop there? Add more

Claim #5: Router vendors think the router networks are not complex, slow and expensive!

Why cannot we do this?

Vendor X

Vendor X

Vendor X

L2 Switch

Vendor Y

Vendor Y

Vendor Y

Metro DC Metro DC Long-Haul

Controller

Application

10GigE

10GigE

Physical Network

10GigE

10GigE

Virtualized Network Via simple interfaces

A

B

C

D

Virtualized Network by Application -- backend load balancer

P1

P2

P3

P4

P5

P6

P7

P8

10GigE

10GigE

Controller

A

B

C

D (ABCD, P1, P7, BW)

P1 P7

Application

P1

P2

P3

P4

P5

P6

P7

P8

10GigE

10GigE

Controller

A

B

C

D (ABCD, P1, P7, BW)

P1 P7

Load Balancer

Data Center App’s

VM distribution

P1

P2

P3

P4

P5

P6

P7

P8

What if… • We scale up the transport network

What if… • We virtualize the network as whole

• We run IP services on top

What if… • We make the IP services 1/10 of the existing price, and sell

to 10x of the customers

Claim #6: It’s not What-If. It’s WHEN

The Last Claim for the Day