UPDATED 10:11 EDT / MARCH 03 2014

Another SDN first, Broadcom unveils OpenFlow switch implementation

open flow blue data center infrastructure flying cubes architecture abstract big data analytics cloudThe combination of open source software and commodity hardware holds the potential for unprecedented efficiency and operational agility but, despite the success of Web-scale giants like Google and Facebook in implementing this paradigm, it has yet to prove itself in the enterprise. There remain significant barriers to adoption, notably the immaturity of the underlying technologies and the surrounding ecosystem.

Identifying the opportunity in the challenge, the industry has banded together in an effort to bridge the gap, and steady progress is now being made under the banners of the Open Compute Project, the OpenStack Foundation and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). The latter group is the probably least buzzed-about of the three, but is an equally important player in the push for the software-defined data center.

The ONF is the driving force behind OpenFlow, a programmable network protocol that decouples the control plane from the physical infrastructure on which it runs to simplify management. The technology has been brought several steps closer to production this morning with the release of Broadcom’s OpenFlow Data Plane Abstraction, or OF-DPA v1.0 for short.

Unveiled today at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara (where theCUBE is broadcasting live interviews all day on SiliconANGLE.tv), OF-DPA is hailed as the first open source reference implementation of a physical OpenFlow switch. OF-DPA’s design, which comes with complementary software and an API library, is meant to enable network virtualization use cases on top of Broadcom’s StrataXGS line of Ethernet switches. “APIs are critical in allowing SDN solutions to develop automated and simplified environments.” says Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman. “As a leader in switching ASICs, Broadcom is a critical player in allowing physical switches to become part of a programmable network.”

Broadcom says that it addresses traditional bottlenecks to high performance and scalability in software-defined networking (SDN) environments. “Software is a key attribute of what we do,” Broadcom CTO Nick Ilyadis told SiliconANGLE’s founder John Furrier and Wikibon analyst Dave Vellante in an interview on theCUBE, live at the HP Discover 2013 conference (see entire segment below). “Our controllers and adapters are based on a RISC (reduced instruction set computer) processor,” he said, “so one of the reason we have so much flexibility in our controllers is that they’re programmable; they’re not state machine-driven controllers where everything you do has been dictated. These controllers actually run code at very high rates.”

Two of Broadcom’s larger goals in establishing network standards with OpenFlow are to “enable growth of SDN applications ecosystem over widely deployed switch architecture and to enable OpenFlow-based SDN applications at higher performance and scale,” Sujal Das, Director of Product Marketing, Network Switch at Broadcom told siliconANGLE. Broadcom hopes that OF-DPA will foster OpenFlow adoption among vendors and “facilitate general availability of production-quality” products based on the protocol.

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Industry support

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The specification is already supported by NEC and emerging SDN startup BigSwitch Networks, which compete in a relatively new but already crowded market that has attracted the likes of Cisco and VMware. The two latter firms became rivals in this space after the virtualization giant’s surprise acquisition of SDN startup Nicira in 2012. The $1.2 billion deal spawned NSX, a network abstraction layer that directly competes with Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).

The first component of the offering, the ACI Controller, debuted this past January alongside InterCloud, a software solution that enables users to freely move workloads between on- and off-premise deployments. The product offers similar functionality to VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service, which launched in Europe last week.

More recently, Cisco pulled the curtains back on OpenAppID, an “application-focused detection language” for the Snort network intrusion prevention system (NIPS) it obtained through the acquisition of Sourcefire last summer. The technology makes it possible to provide tailored security for enterprise applications, which is particularly useful in regulated industries where companies have to meet strict compliance requirements they can’t effectively address using off-the-shelf solutions.

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Top of Rack Switch usage

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When asked how open source can help the enterprise operate more like the public cloud, Broadcom’s Das replied that SDN is helping evolve the Top of Rack (TOR) Switch usage and deployment models to become similar to server usage and deployment models. 

“Just like Linux and open solutions on the server has helped enterprises operate more like public cloud from a compute infrastructure perspective,” he explained, “Linux and open solutions on the TOR switches promise to help enterprises operate more like public cloud from a network infrastructure perspective.”

For more, watch theCUBE as it broadcasts live interviews and analysis from the Open Networking Summit today. Watch SiliconANGLE.tv for breaking news and ongoing coverage, and be sure to view our event archives here.

Below, see Broadcom CTO Nick Ilyadis’ entire commentary on the importance of software in the modern data center, specifically regarding Broadcom’s networking goals for future infrastructure.

photo credit: subarcticmike via photopin cc

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Suzanne Kattau contributed to this article.

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