Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Mellanox Boosts SDN and Open Source with New Switch Software


By Cecelia Taylor on January 13, 2014
Authored by:  Amir Sheffer, Sr. Product Manager

This week we reinforced our commitment to Open Ethernet, open source and Software Defined Networking (SDN). With the latest software package for our Ethernet switches. Mellanox has added support for two widely used tools—OpenFlow and Puppet, among other important features.
The introduction of the new functionality allows users to move towards using more SDN and automation in their data centers. Compared to custom CLI scripts, OpenFlow and Puppet enable customers to control and monitor switches in a unified, centralized manner, thus simplifying the overall network management effort, with less time and cost. Forwarding rules, policies and configurations can be set once then applied to many switches across the network, automatically.



Flexible OpenFlow Support
Mellanox Ethernet switches can now operate in OpenFlow hybrid switch mode, and expose both an OpenFlow forwarding pipeline and a locally-managed switching and routing pipeline. The OpenFlow forwarding pipeline utilizes thousands of processing rules (or flows), the highest number in the industry.
Switches interface with an OpenFlow controller using an integrated OpenFlow agent that allows direct access to the SwitchX®-2-based switch forwarding and routing planes.  The hybrid switch model provides the most robust, easy-to-use and efficient implementation, as it can forward a packet according to the OpenFlow configuration, when such a match is found, or can handle it by its forwarding/routing pipeline, according to the locally-managed switch control applications.



This allows customers to implement OpenFlow rules where they provide the most benefit without needing to move every switch completely to OpenFlow-only management. By processing non-OpenFlow data through its local management plane and leveraging the local forwarding pipeline, the hybrid switch increases network performance and efficiency, through faster processing of new flows as well as lower load on the controllers.
This is much more flexible than another OpenFlow switch mode called OpenFlow-only. This mode does not allow the switch to have a local control plane, so each and every flow must be configured by the OpenFlow controller, which in turn creates high load on the controllers, resulting in high latency and low efficiency.
Open-Source Automation via Puppet
Further enhancing the openness of our switches and the standardization of configuration, Mellanox switches now integrate the Puppet™ automation software agent. Puppet provides an open-source-based standard interface for device configuration and management. Tasks, such as software downloads, port configurations, and VLAN management can be managed automatically according to defined policies.  Mellanox’s implementation of the Puppet agent is Netdev, which is a vendor-neutral network abstraction framework. Mellanox Netdev has been submitted to the DevOps community and can be downloaded for free.
Customers have the choice to manage our switches using a CLI, Web GUI, SNMP, XML, and now Puppet and OpenFlow. This allows the flexibility to design the easiest and most scalable management solution for each environment, and expands Mellanox’s commitment to open source.
Mellanox is involved and contributes to other open source projects, such as OpenStackONIE, Quagga and others, and already contributed certain adaptor applications to the open source community. Mellanox is also a leading member and contributor of the Open Compute Project, where it provides NICs, switches and software.
RESOURCES
- See more at: http://www.mellanox.com/blog/#sthash.iWlFB3Ly.dpuf

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