© 2012 IBM Corporation

Panel : Future Data Center Networks

Vijoy Pandey, Ph.D.

CTO, Network OS

IBM Distinguished Engineer

vijoy.pandey@us.ibm.com

Networking folks were poor

• Custom silicon or poor functionality • Low bandwidth ASICs • Poor topologies • Immature protocols • Non-robust control plane software

IBM System Networking 2

Data Center network over the past decade

IBM System Networking 3

Deployment Velocity (Scale-Out)

…

First wave of Data Center (network) deployments were all about Deployment Velocity (Time To Value)

― How quickly can you deploy infrastructure? ― How scalable is the infrastructure? ― How easily can you manage this scale-out infrastructure?

Highly-available

High-capacity Ease of

configuration

Ease of expansion

More Bandwidth

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PCI versus Ethernet Bandwidth (in Gigabits/sec)

I/O in Gbps Ethernet (Gbps)

PCIE Gen 1

PCIE Gen 2

PCIE Gen 3 PCIE Gen 4

1 Gbps

10 Gbps

40 Gbps

100 Gbps

400 Gbps

1Tbps

PCIE Gen 5

IBM System Networking 4

Better Topologies

• Multi-tiered tree topologies • High oversubscription • Expensive, high bandwidth uplinks • Robustness of higher tier product

has been a concern

• 2-tiered mesh or Clos topologies • Oversubscription only to WAN/core • Large cross sectional bandwidth

(TOR bandwidth is cheap) • Mature Layer 2/3 software

IBM System Networking 5

We are entering an era of Network Affluence

With affluence comes a demand for Quality of Life: • Can you ease my provisioning headache? • Can you hide all complexity of the physical infrastructure? • Can my applications talk to my network? • Can you simplify how I monitor my network?

• Can “this particular communication” be of “Platinum” service

• Can you guarantee certain latency characteristics? End to End? • Can you guarantee certain bandwidth? End to End?

IBM System Networking 6

Application Velocity

IBM System Networking 7

Software Defined Networking

Ap

plic

atio

n V

elo

city

Deployment Velocity

Switch-embedded Firmware

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Next-Gen Data Center Network deployments will demand both:

• Application Velocity ― Can you provision virtualized network resources along with compute/storage ― Can the network be smarter due to application awareness ― Can you quickly and effectively enable newer network services

• Deployment Velocity ― How quickly can you deploy infrastructure ― How scalable is the infrastructure ― How easily can you manage this scale-out infrastructure

Virtual Provisioning of an Integrated System

Discrete Physical Infrastructure

• Virtual Servers • Virtual Storage • Physical Network

Virtual Integrated Systems

Managing a group of systems – servers, storage, network with the simplicity of a single system

Virtualized System comprises servers, storage and networking End to end experience

Initial set up Provisioning of new workloads, including image management Continuous optimization through mobility, etc.

OS

SW

Compute

Storage

Network

OS

SW

Compute

Storage

Network

OS

SW

Compute

Storage

Network

OS

SW

Virtual Compute Pool

Virtual Storage Pool

OS

SW

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OS

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Virtual Compute Pool

Virtual Storage Pool

OS

SW

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Virtual Network Pool

IBM System Networking 8 IBM System Networking 8

9

Application connectivity services

Enterprise or Cloud • allow users to declaratively specify logical application topologies

• path attributes, security rules, and service traversal

• instantiate paths, rules, etc. using SDN (virtual or physical)

• seamless integration between application deployment and required network configuration

• removes need for separate network admin handoff

• services can be constrained / specified by networking team

group

logical grouping of workloads

vlink

bidirectional communication link

network-service attach services to a vlink

firewall rules

resv bandwidth

VLAN / scoped bcast

path diversity

middlebox

deploy and config a new middlebox

IPS Web FW App FW DB

cluster

DB disjoint

LB

Virtualized Provisioning : Example

profile

Network attributes for cluster communication

IBM System Networking

Applications influence the network

IBM System Networking 10

VM

VM

VM

VM

App App

Network Hypervisor

Program & Instruct

SDN Platform

What is Software Defined Networking?

• Applications-awareness benefits: – Business Applications and Services can program

and influence the network

– Create and deploy new applications and protocols quickly

• Network Hypervisor benefits: – Virtualized network resource provisioning

– De-couples virtual network from physical network

– Simple “configure once” network

– Cloud scale (e.g. multi-tenant)

• Control-Data separation benefits: – End-2-end Semantics and Guarantees

– Simpler to deploy, debug and monitor

– Fine grained control for each client-server pair(s)

– Openflow (protocol and various controllers) are a standard way of achieving this

Control Plane Software

HW & embedded SW

5KV 5KV

5KV 5KV

SDN Controller Platform • Global state & efficient capacity management • Optimizations and placements

Apps Services Apps Services

Network Hypervisor

Openflow Controller

Virtual Network Resources

Data Plane

IBM System Networking 11

Openflow as defined today

IBM System Networking 12

Mishmash of concepts within the SAME data center

Distributed or Centralized

IBM System Networking 13

• Ethernet topologies were built distributed Scalable but hard to monitor

• Openflow topologies (today) are centralized Control-data separation forces this model

IBM System Networking 14

Packet or Flow Switched

• Ethernet topologies are packet switched Statistical link utilization

• Openflow topologies (today) are flow switched Application level network control

Open questions for the Research & Openflow Communities

• No customer pays for the re-invention of the wheel

• Customers do pay for a smoother ride

IBM System Networking 15

Open Questions for the Research and Openflow Communities

IBM System Networking 16

Pod (server/storage/network)

Isolate a few (long) flows for preferential treatment by applications

Federation of controllers with each controller handling (smaller)

integrated system (pod)