With just a few minutes to spare until the 5:30 start of the evening event and exhibits, I thought I’d give a really quick summary of Day 1 at the Open Networking Summit 2012. Note there were two tutorial sessions today and I attended the one for engineers.
The first thing you noticed by seeing everyone’s badges/name tags with associated company, and was confirmed by Brandon’s presentation in the first slide, was there was and is a truly broad audience here. There are the obvious participants from the big name manufacturers, but also, there are between 1-3 people from at least 60 “other” companies, which is the category I fall into since I’m the only one representing BlueWater from NY/NJ. I also had the pleasure of sitting next to the sole person from Aruba Networks as well. Not sure what that tells you about their SDN strategy.
The first thing you noticed by seeing everyone’s badges/name tags with associated company, and was confirmed by Brandon’s presentation in the first slide, was there was and is a truly broad audience here. There are the obvious participants from the big name manufacturers, but also, there are between 1-3 people from at least 60 “other” companies, which is the category I fall into since I’m the only one representing BlueWater from NY/NJ. I also had the pleasure of sitting next to the sole person from Aruba Networks as well. Not sure what that tells you about their SDN strategy.
Overall, the Engineer session was largely academic and geared towards the developer community. Unfortunately, when I hear engineer, I typically think network engineer or systems engineer (SE), but clearly that is not the case when you’re in SJC – engineer is definitely a MTS. The product manager session may have been more suited for my day to day interactions, but I did want to experience the brief hands-on portion just to get acquainted with it, so I’ll say it was worth it. There were also some videos/demos shown during the tutorial that I saw on YouTube over a year ago! They could have been refreshed or have shown new demos – since there is so much innovation occurring, right?
I think what I really am looking for are deep dives on actual commercial (and future) products – so I am really looking forward to talking with the many exhibitors. For me, working with academic-like (very raw) controllers doesn’t do much; if anything, it brings doubt to Enterprise wide adoption.
Other notes:
Probably obvious, but one of the lessons learned from Stanford was a great one, “OpenFlow vendors’ implementations interact badly with STP and protocols such as CDP/LLDP confuse debugging”
Rob Sherwood, from Big Switch, states network operators may have the role of creating scripts in future of supporting SDN networks, when asked what the role of the network operator will be in the future. This is debatable for sure, but the point to note is that networks are changing, and someone will need to be writing network scripts and network based applications. Who will those people be?
Don’t forget you can have a controller per switch on the network – nothing states you NEED ONE controller (or HA pair, etc.) to support a full OpenFlow/SDN network. This can be sliced and diced a million ways.
Off to the exhibits to see what these guys really have brewing! More to come later in the week…
I think what I really am looking for are deep dives on actual commercial (and future) products – so I am really looking forward to talking with the many exhibitors. For me, working with academic-like (very raw) controllers doesn’t do much; if anything, it brings doubt to Enterprise wide adoption.
Other notes:
Probably obvious, but one of the lessons learned from Stanford was a great one, “OpenFlow vendors’ implementations interact badly with STP and protocols such as CDP/LLDP confuse debugging”
Rob Sherwood, from Big Switch, states network operators may have the role of creating scripts in future of supporting SDN networks, when asked what the role of the network operator will be in the future. This is debatable for sure, but the point to note is that networks are changing, and someone will need to be writing network scripts and network based applications. Who will those people be?
Don’t forget you can have a controller per switch on the network – nothing states you NEED ONE controller (or HA pair, etc.) to support a full OpenFlow/SDN network. This can be sliced and diced a million ways.
Off to the exhibits to see what these guys really have brewing! More to come later in the week…
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