What Would You Do With Two Million Flows?

Today, Pica8 announced support for Table Type Patterns (TTP) in PicOS, our leading SDN operating system. The premise of this announcement is that with TTP, network engineers and operators can now implement SDN at greater scale – in some cases, up to two million flows (a 1,000x increase from previous methodologies) – while still using standard, white box hardware.

The magic of the technology is how PicOS can seamlessly leverage the capabilities of different switch ASICs. This empowers users with greater choice, and enables them to take advantage of unique capabilities of the ASIC they choose – such as memory space, programmable pipelines, and table management.

In terms of how we achieve greater flow scale with TTP, it’s similar to what I wrote about OpenFlow scale last year: all tables within the ASIC (VLAN, MAC, IP, TCAM, etc) are exposed and can be programmed via OpenFlow. But what’s more interesting is how we are seeing customers put this functionality to use.

Example 1: Cloud Brokering

For ISPs, automation and self-service portals are nirvana for the reduction in OpEx alone. If a customer wants to increase their bandwidth from 10Mbps to 100Gbps, but only wants to do it from Continue reading

Getting Back to Basics with SDN

Typically when things start to get complicated, we talk about getting ‘back to basics’. The premise, of course, is to better compartmentalize, keep things in simple, digestible chunks, and not lose sight of the fundamentals.

For instance, if you’re not hitting the golf ball straight, it’s because you’ve incorporated too much variance into your swing. A good golf instructor will break the swing down into its components, and help you work on the basics.

We’re pretty far into the software-defined networking (SDN) hype cycle now. Every networking company (or even network service company) has an SDN story. In a lot of cases, SDN is still vapor-ware or marketecture. And for customers, there’s plenty of ‘SDN fatigue’ – which story should you believe?

In short, things have gotten a little complicated.

So what does getting back to basics mean in an SDN context? It’s means understanding the fundamentals components of an SDN solution. Fortunately, we can draw from real data and learn what’s working from customers that have already deployed.

Recently, EMA published research on the impact of SDN on network management. The report featured survey data from over 226 early adopters of SDN – both in the service roviders and Continue reading