Last year at ONS, Google announced they had built their own switches, OpenFlow controller, Traffic Engineering algorithms, and were using OpenFlow on their Wide Area Network links.  This year, Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist announced they are also using OpenFlow in their data centers, not just between them anymore.  So, what can’t Google do on their own and where could they use some help from the vendors out there?  This was a question asked to Amin Vahdat, Distinguished Engineer at Google, during a panel discussion during this year’s Open Networking Summit. 

After attending ONS last week, I will say there is some doubt on if the OpenDaylight Project (ODP) team can execute (not just about the project in general), but at the same time there is an increased amount of optimism from the SDN community.  I first posted about the ODP here when it launched and I can say I’m one of the optimists at this point.  Borrowing Omar Sultan’s LinkedIn headline, I’ll cautiously call myself a skeptical optimist.  You always need a bit of healthy paranoia/skepticism, don’t you?

Goldman Sachs, the only Enterprise that sits on the Board of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), had a key speaking slot at the 2013 Open Networking Summit in the “Software Defined Networking (SDN) for Enterprises” session.  Steve Schwartz, global head of Telecommunications and Market Data Services at GS, gave the presentation.  Highlights from this session include:

Bruce Davie, former Cisco Distinguished Engineer and now Principal Engineer in the Networking & Security Division of VMware via Nicira, did a pretty good job at confusing the audience this week at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) during his presentation.  While most other presenters talked about Network Virtualization as an application of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Davie wanted to state repeatedly they are different and that network virtualization is possible without SDN.  This is true, and unlike most vendors, he was actually trying not to SDN-wash.  Shouldn’t that be a good thing?  

Today marks the end of the first day at ONS 2013.  You had a choice to attend one of two tutorial sessions: one for engineers and one for market opportunities.  I chose to attend the engineering session mainly because I’ve done a lot of research around SDN and wanted some good quality time in front of the keyboard.

The session was comprised of hands-on labs and lectures.  

I recently had a good exchange with Brian Gracely after a comment I made on twitter in which I was asking where the industry is heading with more open source offerings being announced.  His response to my question can be found here.  Brian poses great questions to keep in mind as technologies and the related value chains continue to evolve.  Think from product acquisition, testing, to production deployments and day 2 support.  The value chain in IT could likely shift over the next few years, so it’s definitely worth the read.  The response was not expected, so thank you to Brian.  Very much appreciated.  I’d encourage all to have a read.

What sort of insight should the physical network fabric offer network operators when it comes to deploying network virtualization? It is a great question and the answer is really going to vary based on who answers it.  Martin Casado and co. recently voiced their perspective here.  As always, Martin’s blogs are a great read and I encourage you to follow him at NetworkHeresy if you aren't already, although there haven’t been many posts since the Nicira acquisition.  Looks like he is making it a community based blog going forward, so let’s hope to see more soon.

We know virtualization, server and network, offer a means of abstracting the underlying physical hardware.  Once the hardware is abstracted though, how much visibility should there be into the virtual networks or virtual servers?  

Have you heard of OpenFlow?  Have you heard of vPath?  Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about how they are related to each other when it comes to, yup, you guessed it --- Software Defined Networking (SDN).  

OpenFlow is one of the most widely talked about protocols in the world of SDN.  It is simply an *open* protocol that enables the separation of the control and data planes of a network device.  Most commonly, it is a protocol used between a controller and physical/virtual switch to remotely program device forwarding tables.

vPath on the other hand, isn’t as popular (yet?) and rarely discussed in SDN conversations, so what is it?

With only one week until Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2013, the announcements have started.  The first is not a vendor announcement, but an industry announcement.  It is the coming out party of industry wide open source project, OpenDaylight.  There have been rumors about OpenDaylight for a few weeks now, so it is good to finally see what it is all about.

The idea behind OpenDaylight is simple.  To move the industry forward toward next generation (software defined) networks.  That sounds like the ONF a bit, but maybe their play is still to focus on standard APIs --- not sure, but look forward to an announcement from the ONF as well.