As virtualization has gotten up to the extreme of private / public / hybrid cloud and compute, storage and network are hypervizorized( a piece of software).
These flavors of hypervizor can be sitting on top of these bare metal whitebox for specific function(s).
Replacing network switches / routers or other specific network components into this whitebox based hardware with network software is "whitebox-networking"
Networking has evolved by building specific hardware for
- speed of data transmission,
- power of packet processing,
- expanding need for network bandwidth on shrinking hardware space
- stack of software with bundles of network protocol functions
Past 2010 - with the approach of shrinking hardware , cheaper faster memory, smaller processor with specific functions with cheaper options and availability ( instead of building custom ASIC , FPGA and Network processor - NP).
Hardware and software both have changed there arise a point of convergence and need for technology to control these whitebox (bare metal) hardware with software , and this controller is SDN ( Software Defined Network) controller see opendaylight.org.
Some very interesting articles
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/google-microsoft-network-gear/all/
Google's Pluto Switch
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/09/pluto-switch/
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/big-switch-indigo-switch_light/
Hardware Solutions
http://cumulusnetworks.com/product/overview/
http://cumulusnetworks.com/product/overview/
Software Solutions
No comments:
Post a Comment