2019 OCP Global Summit

Increasingly, service providers and network operators outside of the data center wish to leverage the advantages of disaggregation that their peers in the data center have enjoyed for several years. This puts pressure on OEMs to supply a portable NOS that runs on Open Compute compatible hardware as well as their own. We will examine the challenges this presents to OEMs and review the options available to them including how open initiatives like ONL, SAI and TAI are making this easier. Finally, we will present an architecture that will allow an OEM to create a portable NOS, based on ONL, with fast time to market, a high degree of flexibility and with the potential to be deployed in the access, aggregation and core networks not currently targeted by any disaggregated, portable, NOS.

A brief overview what ONIE is, followed by an update on the state of the project, and a listing of some future goals

OCP has been a pioneer in both creating open hardware and software standards that promote multi-vendor collaboration and create an ecosystem that benefits both producers and consumers of technology. As Moore’s law slows down the need becomes more critical for acceleration technologies that offload specific data management functions including packet processing and security management. As each vendor may have different implementations of these acceleration co-processors, it is critical to innovate open software interfaces that are hardware-independent and are developed in the open-source community. Importantly the same software APIs should work transparently, whether the functionality is implemented in pure software or using hardware to accelerate data processing. This session will focus on new, open interfaces being developed upstream in the kernel and available to support OCP hardware that accelerate virtual switching, quality of service, traffic class management, security, and storage.

There is a lot of testing to get ready for a new fabric and new hardware, including large-scale device and network testing, as well as operational migration, configuration, and image automation testing.

The Linux kernel has been doing network hardware offloads and acceleration for decades (Nics, smart-nics, wireless AP’s and many other places). Because of this, the kernel has had the infrastructure and the right abstractions to recognize and register a networking hardware device since the early days. And this infrastructure has matured over time. Today Linux enablement is the best way to get faster adoption of your hardware. And also possibly the fastest way to go-to-market. In this talk we look at Open switch hardware's journey into the Linux kernel, ecosystem and community. We will show how embracing Linux for your open switch hardware can simplify and unify your networking infrastructure. Linux kernel has abstractions for supporting switch hardware. We will talk about the support for switch hardware in the Linux kernel and walk through many cases of collaborative development in the Linux community that made this possible. In the recent years the Linux kernel has also received many networking updates to make it a first class network operating system for a data center switch hardware. These include VRF, MPLS, VxLAN, E-VPN and many others. We will cover details on these updates. Today one can build a open E-VPN data center fabric with open switch hardware, Linux kernel and other open software from the Linux ecosystem. How cool is that ?. Running native Linux allows you to now also extend the same E-VPN fabric to servers or hypervisors. We will show how benefits of unifying your networking infrastructure with open hardware and Linux are endless: your provisioning and operational tools are developed and maintained for the same operating system and come from the same Linux ecosystem. We will conclude with a few details on the next big things coming in the Linux kernel and community to support the next generation switch hardware!

White box switches and open networking are no longer only for the hyper scale companies with giant IT organizations. White box in the enterprise is possible, given the right mindset, and a well thought out plan (after much lab testing)... This session discusses the pro's and con's, challenges and pitfalls, and eventual success of white box switch deployments at a medium size enterprise.

Similar to the goals outlined and achieved by Facebook at its Prineville, Oregon, data center facility to prove the value of the Open Compute Project, Kaloom was founded with the vision of providing the most automated and programmable data center networking fabric that will disrupt how data centers are built and managed by cloud providers, telcos and enterprises. The company has created a Software Defined Fabric (SDF) that leverages open networking OCP-compliant white boxes from vendors including Accton and Delta Networks, among others, to reduce CAPEX. Automation features reduce OPEX and minimize time to deployment and configuration errors while the programmable capabilities of its fabric future-proofs network investments compared to slower, more costly merchant silicon product cycles. The fabric leverages OCP’s Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) so that the installer can easily load the network OS across a variety of OCP-compliant switches, delivering greater choice and enabling operators to avoid vendor lock-in. Integrating vRouter, vSwitch, vGateway and other networking functions into a more streamlined data plane pathway enables data center operators to realize OCP’s vision for highly efficient, low-cost operations with dramatically increased performance. By utilizing a container-based architecture and collapsing, or offloading, data plane functions from numerous VMs, a Software Defined Fabric architecture can deliver an increase of up to 2x in throughput with a 7x reduction in latency, improving overall networking efficiency by a factor of 5-10x. This speaker will examine new type of SDN-agnostic networking fabric controller for the OCP switch topology management of spine, leaf and controllers; including virtual fabric creation with resource allocation and modification to deliver virtual network fabric slicing; and utilizing external interfaces. This presentation will explore the benefits of OCP-compliant open source software for networking switch gear leveraging ONIE, and highlight collaboration opportunities with other network focused software projects including OpenStack, OpenShift, Kubernetes and Linux.

Live demo of installing NOS and orchestration agent on an OCP switch and live rollout of configuration of fully functional network with E-BGP, NAT, Load Balancer, ACLs.

"This engineering workshop will focus on the architecture and design of Open Network Linux. The workshop will provide details on the system and platform integration and Open Network Linux Platform APIs. A demonstration of ONL features will be provided along with a walkthrough on how to add new platforms."