Open-Source Switching and SDN Central
April 29, 2014, Ethernet Technology Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Roy Chua from SDNCentral provided observations and identify the has learned in the rollout of open- source switching. The move towards open source switching and white box hardware
brings open source to network switching.
As a result, basic designs and the software stack would be available to everyone on a royalty-free basis. Facebook has taken the lead here as part of its Open Compute Project, with the first design being for a top-of-rack switch. The idea is to handle the physical realities and then let vendors innovate on the software side. This would allow users to change vendors or use hardware from multiple vendors without being locked into proprietary code. It fits well with such newly emerging approaches as open standard servers, software-defined networking, and software-defined storage.
Switching is currently a highly integrated mix of hardware and software with the implementation of virtual switches now have a growing footprint in the industry. As the data volume increases, many physical ports will be connected to a hypervisor based virtual switch with many virtual ports. It is important to track OVS and LINC developments in these areas.
As these systems increasingly deploy and proliferate, there is a realization that white box switching does not have to be open source. ODMs can license closed-source stacks and integrate them on open hardware, just as proprietary hardware can run open-source stacks, or even-open source proprietary stacks.
As a result of these changes, the implementation of software defined network and open-source switching are starting to overlap. Software defined networks emphasize flexibility, automation, virtualization, and reduced management requirements, while open-source switching is driven by automation, programmability, and capital cost reduction. SDN and flow-based programming each provide a portion of value, and the combination of the two provides more than the sum of the pieces.
The reasons users are moving towards open source switches are to reduce hardware and operational costs. Even though the hardware and software or open source, there is still many costs associated with the hardware and software. Open standards for the software and the hardware along with APIs and source code allow for greater customization. The challenges are that users may not have appropriate domain expertise to take advantage of this flexibility, and may have issues with the maturity and maintainability of the code base for formerly vendor supported functions.
Also, if everything is going to the cloud, do you need to be concerned with open-source switching? At the same time, the switch vendors have to monetize their own investments and extract the value from open source and white box systems.
