OpenFlow News

Tatsuya Yabe

Mikio Hara

The OpenFlow team at Stanford has two new members. We are extremely happy to welcome Mikio Hara and Tatsuya Yabe from NEC Japan that will spend the next two years in the Clean Slate lab working on OpenFlow and the next generation networking infrastructure.

Mikio and Tatsuya already joined late last year, and Tatusya has already taken over the NetFPGA port of OpenFlow and recently led the release of  the OpenFlow 0.8.9(r2).

Mikio is taking over the next release of the OpenFlow software reference implementation. Welcome Mikio and Tatsuya!

Two weeks ago we had a great demo of OpenFlow at the third GENI Engineering Conference. Things we demonstrated included:

• A centrally controlled OpenFlow network with OpenFlow switches deployed at Stanford, Internet2 and JGN2plus in Japan.
• Virtual machine mobility at Stanford. You can see this in detail in the SIGCOMM Demo Video.
• Flow Dragging. David Underhill created a fantastic UI that allows you to change the path packets take in the network by dragging the flow with the mouse to new routers an example video is shown below.
• Virtual machine mobility within JGN2plus and between Stanford and JGN2plus. A running virtual machine was migrated across the Pacific while hosts in Japan were communicating with it. The combination of OpenFlow and our controller allowed the virtual machine to change locations and maintain connectivity without changing IP address.

The demonstration OpenFlow network incorporated switches from (in alphabetical order) Cisco, HP, Juniper and NEC.

The slides for Nick’s talk before the demo are online here.

Thanks to Glen who was the technical lead on this demo, as well as to everyone else on the 30 person team from Stanford, HP, NEC, Internet2, Cisco and Juniper who made this a success.

Photo Gallery from the GEC Demo after the jump…

Tim Greene from Computerworld has a very nice article about OpenFlow, vendors that have implemented it and the demo at the GENI Engineering Conference. It is also up on Networkworld.

The GENI Demo just happened a few minutes ago, and it safe to say it was a huge success. We demostrated both virtual machine mobility as well as arbitrary flow routing. More exciting updates on OpenFlow coming soon.

Update: International coverage of OpenFlow in Japanese, Portuguese, Italias, Spanish, Polish and Swedish after the jump.

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NEC today announced their participation in the GEC3 OpenFlow demo, and their intention to support OpenFlow going forward. Press releases are online in English and Japanese. The GEC OpenFlow demo includes several NEC Switches at Stanford as well as in JGN2plus in Tokyo. NEC has been instrumental in working with Stanford to make this demo happen across continents.

The NEC IP8800 switches used in the demo are some of the best OpenFlow hardware that currently exists. They offer a good fan-out and are able to do OpenFlow at line rates. The only bad news is that what we are using are prototypes and they are not available commercially. However to quote from the release:

“NEC plans to support OpenFlow features in its future products and  to encourage universities, public testbed projects, and researchers to  experiment with innovative network ideas. “

So far we have had fairly few details about OpenFlow capable hardware on this blog, but expect this to change in the future. If you are interested in OpenFlow hardware, feel free to get in touch with us.