SDN Applications - Where's the Beef? (from Extreme Talk on June, 21, 2013)

Flying off fromCommunicAsia in Singapore and as you’d expect, SDNwas peppered across vendor booths spanning the campus, data center, and service provider spaces.  What was most interesting is that visitors to our booth – government, industrial, educational, and press – were very open in stating that this was the first time they saw in action a practical SDN-delivered application, as opposed to an elevator switch on protocols and the handful of consortia.  Here’s how we did it….

We have partnerships with two OpenFlow controller and application vendors –Big Switch and NEC. As a company, we build the best Ethernet switches in the world, top it off with an open next generation network operating system –ExtremeXOS – and build in hooks to talk with controllers via standard protocols.   Our real focus in the SDN space is on the application, either demonstrating interoperability and deployability with 3^rd parties, or building our own.

Here, we took both approaches.  In the case of NEC, we demonstrated their network virtualization application, a way to simply manipulate via a GUI groups of VMs belonging to a single group within the enterprise, managed at the logical level.   If the underlying topology changes, the controller ensures that existing groups remain intact, freeing the administrator from having to worry about physical connections.   This network virtualization is of course one of the most fundamental SDN-delivered services, but to many in the hall it was new.

Taking it up a notch, we’ve built in QoS APIs into our switches that the Big Switch controller can leverage.  Using an Android tablet, the end user can toggle ‘low’ or ‘high’ quality for video.  The tablet speaks to the controller, and the controller adapts the flows on the Extreme switches in real-time.  The user experience is impressive, and one can imagine this type of control deployed within education, corporations, or as a service provider offering.  Separate from SDN, we demonstrated our physec capabilities and our visitors were doing the math and speculating how a camera could command additional QoS from the network when detecting motion.   We use Hyperglance to visualize the shift in the flows from the ‘low’ to the ‘high’ quality path, and vice-versa, adding additional reality to how the network actually adapts to the user command.

Time and time again we were told that Extreme Networks is at the forefront of shifting SDN as an academic discussion or technical debate to a framework that has practical applications within the network. The science fairs are over, it’s time to get to work with SDN.

Where’s the beef? We’ve got that for you right here!