Networking Field Day – Afterwards – Brocade SDN
I wanted to start off stating Brocade broke one of the biggest barriers with getting involved with SDN and labbing out the technology. Brocade offers a free download of their Vyatta Controller! With this free download you can run a 5x node SDN network for one year, included with 60x days of support! This eliminates a huge obstacle of actually purchasing the software, sure you may still require the hardware but Brocade SDN Solution features support for OpenDaylight/OpenFlow so you do have many different hardware options.
Now, that I got that out of the way my two favorite pieces of the Brocade was 1. The technical overview of the Vyatta controller and it’s architecture, it was great to see how to the services overlay on each other and what makes it tick. Usually when it comes to some type of SDN solution it’s usually presented as some type of application that does magic. In this case however Brocade definitely did their due-diligence to cover how their controller actually functions. The 2nd thing I loved about this presentation was just how frank and up-front the presentation was. My favorite quote of the whole the presentation was “We know how to code, we went to school. We chose not to program we went into networking.” I can’t say how happy I was to hear someone actually say this! However like it was mentioned in the presentation it appears to be a natural evolution of the field.
As the presentation continues, you really get a sense about how far along the Vyatta controller has come along once the conversation steers towards volumetric traffic management. Having the additional and built-in monitoring of the traffic flows with sFlow and OpenFlow addressing a level of application performance management many current-day data centers frankly do not even have in place today just shows how grown up the tool is becoming. This is built upon again with the flexibility to handle elephant flows differently than other typical data flows, if you are not familiar with the term elephant flows these are just traffic flows that transfer a very high amount of traffic (IE: Something like backup traffic). I can’t tell you how many few companies I’ve worked with in the past that have actually taken into account these ‘elephant flows’.
Now, I don’t want to ruin the whole presentation for you, if you have not watched it yet I highly recommend you give it a watch. There also a great slide in there about Ivan! If you think SDN is still a mystery it’s time to get that Vyatta controller downloaded and running! No more excuses!
You can download the Vyatta Controller here.
Brocade’s Networking Field Day #9 videos can be found here:
CCIE or Null! 
Stephen, thanks for the overview. Just to be clear, there is no specific hardware required to run the Brocade controller–you run it in a VM of whatever flavor you prefer. It also can control any networking device (physical or virtual) with the appropriate interfaces (OF 1.0/1.3, NETCONF, SNMP, etc). The whole point, in fact, is to allow the controller to be inserted into an existing environment without needing new gear. Cheers.
lcaywood
March 12, 2015 at 11:04 PM
Thank you for the clarification.
I was thinking more about the 5x networking nodes running in the fabric, as opposed the Vyatta Controller itself.
Stephen J. Occhiogrosso
March 13, 2015 at 7:48 AM
Yeah, they can be whatever you already have and want to manage via the controller, provided they have the appropriate interfaces.
lcaywood
March 13, 2015 at 5:24 PM
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