Home page and blog.
The Technology Review today published its list of Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2009 or short “TR10”. One of the Technologies is “Software Defined Networking” and the very well written article heavily focuses on our OpenFlow efforts at Stanford.
A second technology that is highlighted is Siri’s personal assistant software. I am really looking forward to trying out Siri’s product when it goes into beta later this year. For full disclosure, Morgenthaler is an investor in Siri.
We just finished the OpenFlow Demo at the GENI Engineering Conference, and it was amazing. We showed our new OpenFlow protocol running on switches from Cisco, Juniper, HP and NEC. Our experimental network stretched half way around the globe from Stanford to Tokyo via New York. It used fibers from Internet2, CalRen and JGN2plus.
Over this network we showed how we can move around a running game server from one physical host to another without the game even getting interrupted. We demonstrated how you can route a network connection with a simple drag and drop interface (e.g. a TCP flow inside Stanford going via Tokyo and Houston). We even sent a running game server to Tokyo from Stanford, without losing the connection.
Press coverage of the demo included articles English, Japanese, Swedish and Spanish. The OpenFlow web site recieved a few thousand hits, with visitors from every major company in the networking space. All this was made possible by about 40 people from Stanford, Internet2, Cisco, Juniper, HP and NEC had been working on this for months.
As a result of this, OpenFlow is building momentum. NEC announced during the conference support for OpenFlow in their product, and more announcements will follow. By mid next year we are hoping to have pilot deployments at 6-10 universities, and I would hope we will see commercial deployments in that time frame as well. All in all a huge step forward for OpenFlow.
The project that currently takes up the majority of my time at Stanford is OpenFlow. OpenFlow is a new protocol that we specified and that vendors are now adding to their routers and switches. What OpenF
low allows you to do is remotely control the behavior of a switch from an controller software that runs on a standard server. This has two major advantages:
Currently the main thing I am working on at Stanford is the OpenFlow Standard. OpenFlow basically allows a software that is running on a commodity PC, to remotely control the flow table and thus the entire routing functionality of a switch (see the excellent white paper). This is a very interesting application for networking, as it allows researchers or start-ups to build new technologies in this space. Think of it as the Facebook API for the networking world. If it takes off, it will lead to a lot of innovation in this space.
Last week we presented a demo of using OpenFlow to migrate game servers in real time (and while people play games on them) across different IP subnets at SIGCOMM 2008. The demo received rave reviews and won the Best Demo Award by a wide margin. I will post more about the Demo and other OpenFlow news on the OpenFlow Blog soon. This week we also held the first OpenFlow tutorial at HOT Interconnects at Stanford (organized by our own John Lockwood this year – great work John!). It was well received and we learned some good lessons how we can improve it in the future.
I am happy to announce that this week I have joined Stanford University as a Consulting Assistant Professor. This may come as a suprise to some people, as I am not exactly your typical academic. Those people would be correct, my job here is not primarily about teaching. The main reason I am joining Stanford is OpenFlow, and it is one of the most exciting technologies I have seen in networking for a long time.
OpenFlow is exciting in two ways. First, it allows you to run new protocols and algorithms on production networks. Before OpenFlow this was very hard, as modern routers have no API that gives access to this low level functionality. Second, it allows you to make centralized yet fine grain routing decisions. This has huge advantages in some areas such as security, data centers or mobility.