Military nations demonstrate their power by testing nuclear weapons. Pure play networking vendors display their power in the SDN ecoystem by releasing Controllers. ~Anonymous

I sat in today on Cisco’s Webcast on OpenFlow and the ONE Controller. Cisco CTO, and Engineering and Chief Architect, David Ward spoke at length of this announcement. Ward is also the Chair of the Technical Advisory Group of the Open Network Foundation (ONF). The webcast featured two use cases – in the Enterprise (Indiana University) and in the Service Provider (NTT Communications) arenas.

A typical OpenFlow Controller, or Switch as defined by the standards, would interface to the Data Plane via OpenFlow Configuration Protocol, OF-Config, (persistent across reboots) and OpenFlow Protocol (mechanism for adding and deleting flows). But OpenFlow is just a part of SDN.

In a classical router or switch, the fast packet forwarding (data path) and the high level routing decisions (control path) occur on the same device. An OpenFlow Switch separates these two functions. The data path portion still resides on the switch, while high-level routing decisions are moved to a separate controller, typically a standard server. The OpenFlow Switch and Controller communicate via the OpenFlow protocol, which defines messages, such as packet-received, send-packet-out, modify-forwarding-table, and get-stats. – ONF Website

The goal of Cisco’s ONE Software Controller is to enable flexible, application-driven customization of network infrastructure. It includes the onePK toolkit – an SDK for developers to write custom applications to solve their business needs. So, a ONE Controller could speak to other vendor devices via the OpenFlow standard or it could speak to Cisco devices via the onePK southbound API. At least that is what the diagram shows – onePK and OpenFlow are side-by-side. However, during the webcast Q&A, it was stated that onePK is an infrastructure that includes support for multiple abstraction protocol; onePK includes Openflow. This is probably semantic.

One of the features described is network slicing. It is intended to provide more than just L2 or L3 segmentation. It is more like a form of multi-tenancy. The way it was described on the call, instead of making decision based on just ‘shortest path’, network slicing can enable the controller to differentiate based on lowest cost path, highest bandwidth path, and latency. At a demo at Cisco Live in London, latency was tweaked and the Controller was able to compute a different path accordingly.

Another feature presented by Cisco in ONE Controller is of hybrid mode SDN, in which network operators can use SDN for specific flows and traditional integrated CP/DP (i.e. classical routers or switches) for the remaining traffic

What are the ramifications of this release on the SDN ecosystem? Well, although the new open source consortium Daylight supposedly does not include Cisco onePK on Day 1, it is very likely it will be included in about six months. Cisco has announced platform support roadmaps for the Platform APIs (onePK platforms), Controller Agents, and Overlay Networks such as VXLAN Gateway. Some of these won’t be available until Q3 of this year. That sounds just about the right time for a vendor to provide an end-to-end solution for Daylight. If a pure play hardware networking vendor, such as Cisco, can provide a free open source controller, it will be able to kill the competition from many SDN startups. For example, take Floodlight, the open source OpenFlow controller that was developed by Big Switch and is sold on a freemium licensing model. If ONE Controller is given away for free, why would a customer use Floodlight?

In other words, in Daylight there is no need for Floodlights!

I’m writing this post the week after Cisco Live was held in London. I did not attend Cisco Live, but this morning I attended a Cisco event today titled entitled Fabric Innovations for the World of Many Clouds. It was kicked off by Cisco’s Chief Strategy Officer Padmasree Warrior who outlined the Fabric vision of the company at this time, which is summarized in the figure below.

The Nexus 6000 is a new product line with a super high 10/40 Gbps port density and hovering at 1.2 microsecond port-to-port latency. Available today, the 4RU Nexus 6004 has 48x40Gbps ports along with 4 expansion modules allowing for a total of up to 96x40Gbps ports. Also announced, but available in Q2, is the Nexus 6001 – a 1RU switch with 48x1Gx10G with 4x10G/40G uplinks.  Senior VP of Cisco’s Data Center Business Unit, David Yen, said that even Cisco could avail of merchant silicon, but that they still backed their own custom silicon to deliver lower port-to-port latencies, as seen in their Algo Boost technology. To give you an idea on how low 1.2 microseconds is in the industry, Arista has been boasting low-latency switches as low as 350 nanoseconds port-to-port for several years. But Cisco already has an answer for Arista’s ultra-low latency switches – the Nexus 3548 which boast port-to-port latencies as low as 190 nanoseconds. These are better suited for financial exchanges where low switching latencies are critical for conducting electronic trades.

Cisco claims it can scale the Nexus 6004’s 1.2 microsecond latency for as many as 1,500 10G ports. The number 1500 is attained when the Nexus 6004 is combined with another new product – the Nexus 2248PQ Fabric Extender. The last-named product can support 1500 GE or 10GE server ports through Cisco’s FEX technology. Assuming 50 VMs per server, this means that the 1500 FEX ports can support up to 75,000 VMs. This is an impressive number and shows the scalability of the Nexus 6000 platform.

The Network Analysis Module (NAM) has also now formally made its foray into the Nexus offering. I worked a lot with the first two generations of the NAM in 2004 and was impressed by its robustness (one of the few products at the time to be built on Linux) and ease of use. Of course, that was with the Catalyst 6500 platform, which was defribilliated a couple of years ago with the Supervisor 2T. It seems that Cisco is now finally bringing service modules onto the Nexus platform.

The second major announcement was the Nexus 1000V InterCloud for connecting enterprise clouds to provider clouds in a secure manner. The highlights are making application migrations incredibly simple without having to convert VM formats, create templates, deploy site-to-site tunnels between clouds, or re-configure network policies. The Nexus 1000V IC is intended to automate all these steps and support all hypervisors. It is managed by Virtual Network Management Center (VNMC) InterCloud. The highlight of that (to me) was that it hooks into cloud orchestration systems like Cloupia (Cisco’s recent acquisition) and Cisco’s own Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) via a northbound API. Hybrid cloud deployment solutions are a relatively new area and I will be following how this pans out with great interest.

I was most keen about the third announcement, which was of Cisco’s ONE Controller. Last year Cisco announced onePK, but there was no product. Now finally, there is the Controller. It features northbound APIs, such as REST and OSGI and southbound APIs, such as OpenFlow and Cisco’s own onePK. Cisco also announced a roadmap for the ONE Controller’s compatibility with Cisco’s existing Nexus and Catalyst product line.

More information is available from the following links:

Introducing Nexus 6000 Series
Cisco Launches Nexus 1000V InterCloud Part I
Cisco Launches Nexus 1000V InterCloud Part II