OpenFlow News

We are getting ready for the OpenFlow demo at the Geni Engineering Conference 3. We had a first dry run yesterday which by and large went fine. Stanford also today did a press release on OpenFlow and the GEC Demo. Full text after the jump.

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Yesterday OpenFlow was demonstrated at the Cisco Distinguished Engineers Meeting in Sunnyvale. We demonstrated virtual machine mobility and the graphical user interface for flow dragging. Our OpenFlow network included nodes in Internet2 and JGN2plus (Japan). The demo was very well received.

This was also the warm-up for the big demo at the GENI engineering conference next week at HP Labs. Expect to read more here in a few days.

Today we presented OpenFlow at the POMI off-site. POMI 2020 is a new major research effort at Stanford that is exploring how the wide proliferation of powerful mobile devices will change networking, computing and applications. POMI involves about 15 Stanford faculty from electrical engineering, computer science but also other fields such at education.

One of the major challenges of future mobile networked devices is that the current IP based infrastructure does not offer good support for either security nor mobility, and OpenFlow offers potential solutions with POMI and Ethane type solutions. OpenFlow will be one of the major initiatives inside POMI and we are excited about the potential collaborations.

We gave a short presentation of OpenFlow in the context of Enterprise GENI at the GENI CIO Meeting in Chicago today, and finished it with a live demo of the system running at Stanford. Everything worked very well, with the dashboard running in Chicago and us being able to demonstrate VM mobility and flow optimization (Thanks Glen and David U!).

There seems to be a lot of interests from University CIOs in OpenFlow as a potential tool for networking research. Specifically the ability to run production traffic and experimental traffic on the same switching hardware with good separation received a lot of questions. There seems to be a natural tension at Unviersities between networking researchers that want maximum flexibility, and the people operating the production network that want to keep everything stable and secure. An OpenFlow switch that separates OpenFlow and production traffic by VLAN seems to provide at least a partial solution to this problem.

Today at the SIGCOMM 2008 conference in Seattle our demo of OpenFlow for virtual machine mobility won the award for the best demonstration. An abstract of the demo can be found on the SIGCOMM site here.

This demo was a huge group effort between Stanford, Cisco and HP. In the end everything worked perfectly and the response from SIGCOMM attendees was overwhelming. Congratulations to everyone who contributed including David, Glen, Brandon, David, Jad, Guido, Guru, Nick, Mendel, Monica, Masa, Miles, Adam and Bob at Stanford. Thanks to Sailesh, Valentina, Pere and Flavio at Cisco and Jean, Praveen, Sujata, Charles and Rick at HP.

We’ll have more about the demo including video and photos later.

Also congratulations to Neda, Sara, Yashar, Brandon and David to their second place for the NetFPGA demo!

The beginning of Masa's and Guido's modeling careers

David, Brandon, and Glen’s concensus? “Take off the undershirts, divas…”