Startup watch

http://www.medianama.com/2012/10/223-gsf-accelerators-first-15-startups-zoomdeck-tushky-playcez-eduflix-more/

http://cubito.in/

Cloud Based IPTV

Oh!! man , IP based TVs are not a future technology since 10 years, but more and more network centric solutions amaze me.
When netflix was down a month back this year amazon web services were blamed and a glitch in their architecture caused the glitch in netflix since amazon EC2 and S3 are used to stream netflix (http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/cloud-connect-netflix-finds-home-in-amaz/229300547)

There are more cloud based

• Cisco videoscape
• ActiveVideo H5 
• Telus Optik TV

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8NOrnL3-4Q
http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1280717

New Era of Whitebox Virtual Switches

whitebox hardware companies are the once who are building the hardware to run enterprise level network switch software.

Some good examples are
http://cumulusnetworks.com

•  Interestingly most of the founders are ex-cisco

http://www.pica8.com/

• This should be chinese version of this solution

 Arista's 7x switch

• This week arista jumped and announced their new product 7000 series of switch ( note : cloud switch )
• Single tier spline : in the rush to use the terminology before cisco insieme release
• The Arista 7300 is comprised of three chassis: the Arista 7304, 7308 and 7316 with 4, 8 and 16 line card slots respectively. All three share a common resilient architecture that scales up to 512 ports of 40GbE or 2,048 ports of 10GbE, with wirespeed performance of 40Tbps (terabits per second) of throughput. X Series line card modules for the Arista 7300 include 10GBASE-T, SFP and QSFP configurations. Front-to-rear and rear-to-front airflow options along with platinum rated power supplies allow for improved efficiency and middle-of-row Spline configurations.
  Two Arista 7316 Series systems can fit in a single 42RU rack supporting over 4000 10GbE ports. With power consumption under 3W per 10GbE port and latency under 2 microseconds, a pair of 7300 series switches replaces two Catalyst 6509Es with more than ten times the scale, throughput, latency improvement and power efficiency.
  Complementing the 7300X series, the Arista 7250X Series is a high density solution delivering 64 ports of wire-speed 40GbE or up to 256 Ports of 10GbE in a compact and power efficient two rack unit fixed form factor with redundant and hot-swap power supplies and fan modules. Key features on the 7300X and 7250X Series:
  -- Unified Forwarding Table: The Layer 2 MAC table and Layer 3 routing tables dynamically expand based on the application to support up to 288K MAC entries, or 144K routes.
  -- New Duplex Fiber 40GbE Optics: Support for Arista's LRL4 QSFP optics requiring a single pair of single mode fiber, reducing the fiber requirements by 75% compared to existing choices.
  -- Network Telemetry: Real-time visibility into network congestion, buffer management and industry-standard sFlow support for traffic analysis.
  -- Physical-Virtual-Cloud Network: Arista VMTracer provisioning and native VXLAN support, workload mobility and migration at wire speed across multiple hypervisors.
  Pricing and Availability
  The Arista 7300 and 7250 Series are key components of the Arista Software Defined Cloud Network. The 7250QX-64 is available now and shipping for $1500 per 40GbE port. The 7300X series are available in Q1 2014 from $500 per 10GbE port. For more information, please visit http://www.aristanetworks.com/en/products/

Cisco Insieme - Nexus 9000 - Nexus 9K - N9K

I happened to read this post about CISCO Nexus 9K product a high speed high density switch at 40G http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/cisco-nexus-9000-aimed-40g

The best part i liked is the comment section, scroll all the way down to the page and enjoy.

"Interesting considering the paint isnt even dry on the 7700. Given the 7700 launch, one might think they could have waited another year for the custom asics to be ready. I guess we will know for sure soon enough"

NFV (Network Function Virtualization)

I came across few commercial solutions to justify the buzz word NFV, where a merchant silicon function of FPGA,ASICs are moved on to the software and a very good example is in below video where Mobile Core Packet Network (EPC - Evolved Packet Core) is virtualized as software

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/events/corporate/mobile-world-congress-2013/mwc-evolved-packet-core.html


http://www.sdncentral.com/companies/6wind-nfv-interview-2013/2013/08/

Some other network function virtualization i can recognize are

• Any critical data plane traffic could be a good candidate for NFV
• DPI ( Deep Packet Inspection) 
• Switching (OVS is now part of linux)
• See 6WINDGate ; Maximizing the switching performance of the virtual switch to provide high-bandwidth to the VNF running in VMs thereby increasing the aggregated bandwidth delivered to the VMs. Second, it accelerates the data plane performance of each VNF
• A good use case is : In any traditional network each hardware does a separate function in a network, in the newer NFV based network multi-tenant solutions solved CAPEX and OPEX 

Another good example of open source project NFV-IMS (i.e)Virtualize the IP Multimedia subsystem network components see http://www.projectclearwater.org/

http://www.sdncentral.com/news/nfv-comes-life-sdn-openflow-world-congress/2013/10/

Point of sale - Solutions

Came across http://www.lightspeedretail.com/compare/

Looks cool

List of OpenFlow Software Projects

(I am trying to keep a running list of all OpenFlow-related software projects where either the bits or the source are available online. If you know of one that I'm missing, please e-mail me and I'll include it)
Switch Software and Stand-Alone OpenFlow Stacks

Open vSwitch: (C/Python) Open vSwitch is a an OpenFlow stack that is used both as a vswitch in virtualized environments and has been ported to multiple hardware platforms. It is now part of the Linux kernel (as of 3.3).
OpenFlow Reference: (C) The OpenFlow reference implementation is a minimal OpenFlow stack that tracks the spec.
Pica8: (C) An open switch software platform for hardware switching chips that includes an L2/L3 stack and support for OpenFlow.
Indigo: (C) Indigo is a for-hardware-switching OpenFlow implementation based on the Stanford reference implementation.
Pantou: (C) Pontou is an OpenFlow port to the OpenWRT wireless environment.
OpenFaucet: (Python) OpenFaucet is a pure Python implementation of the OpenFlow 1.0.0 protocol, based on Twisted. OpenFaucet can be used to implement both switches and controllers in Python.
OpenFlowJ: (Java) OpenFlow stack written in Java.
Oflib-node: (Javascript) Oflib-node is an OpenFlow protocol library for Node. It converts between OpenFlow wire protocol messages and Javascript objects.
Nettle: (Haskell) OpenFlow library written in Haskell.
Controller Platforms

POX: (Python) Pox as a general SDN controller that supports OpenFlow. It has a high-level SDN API including a queriable topology graph and support for virtualization.
MUL: (C) MūL, is an openflow (SDN) controller. It has a C based muli-threaded infrastructure at its core. It supports a multi-level north bound interface for hooking up applications. It is designed for performance and reliability which is the need of the hour for deployment in mission-critical networks.
NOX: (C++/Python) NOX was the first OpenFlow controller.
Jaxon: (Java) Jaxon is a NOX-dependent Java-based OpenFlow Controller.
Trema: (C/Ruby) Trema is a full-stack framework for developing OpenFlow controllers in Ruby and C.
Beacon: (Java) Beacon is a Java-based controller that supports both event-based and threaded operation.
Floodlight: (Java) The Floodlight controller is Java-based OpenFlow Controller. It was forked from the Beacon controller, originally developed by David Erickson at Stanford.
Maestro: (Java) Maestro is an OpenFlow "operating system" for orchestrating network control applications.
NDDI - OESS: OESS is an application to configure and control OpenFlow Enabled switches through a very simple and user friendly User Interface.
Ryu: (Python) Ryu is an open-sourced Network Operating System (NOS) that supports OpenFlow.
NodeFlow (JavaScript) NodeFlow is an OpenFlow controller written in pure JavaScript for Node.JS.
ovs-controller (C) Trivial reference controller packaged with Open vSwitch.
Special Purpose Controllers

RouteFlow RouteFlow, is an open source project to provide virtualized IP routing services over OpenFlow enabled hardware. RouteFlow is composed by an OpenFlow Controller application, an independent RouteFlow Server, and a virtual network environment that reproduces the connectivity of a physical infrastructure and runs IP routing engines (e.g. Quagga).
Flowvisor (Java) FlowVisor is a special purpose OpenFlow controller that acts as a transparent proxy between OpenFlow switches and multiple OpenFlow controllers.
SNAC (C++) SNAC is an OpenFlow controller builton NOX, which uses a web-based policy manager to manage the network.
Resonance Resonance is a Network Access Control application built using NOX and OpenFlow.
Oflops (C) OFlops (OpenFLow Operations Per Second) is a standalone controller that benchmarks various aspects of an OpenFlow switch.
Misc

STS SDN Troubleshooting Simulator
FlowScale FlowScale is a project to divide and distribute traffic over multiple physical switch ports. FlowScale replicates the functionality in load balancing appliances but using a Top of Rack (ToR) switch to distribute traffic.
NICE-OF NICE is a tool to test OpenFlow controller application for the NOX controller platform.
OFTest OFTest is a Python based OpenFlow switch test framework and collection of test cases. It is based on unittest which is included in the standard Python distribution.
Mirage Mirage is an exokernel for constructing secure, high-performance network applications across a variety of cloud computing and mobile platforms. Apparently, it supports OpenFlow.
Wakame VDC (Ruby) IaaS platform that uses OpenFlow for the networking portion.
ENVI ENVI is a GUI framework that was designed as an extensible platform which can provide the foundation of many interesting OpenFlow-related networking visualizations.
NS3 (C++/Python) NS3 is a network simulator. It has openflow support built in to emulate an openflow environment and also it can be used for real-time simulations.

Network Visibility Controller

Virtualized network traffic Visibility

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzSU7feB-I4

• ·         Traffic on the physical host can be tapped from a physical port on the host or by spanning

• ·         Netoptics phanthom vTap: monitoring at kernel level instead of SPAN or port mirror traffic from the port.

FPGA vs Network Processor

http://www.nallatech.com/
http://www.aliathon.com/

vFabric VMWare

VMWare have a vFabric appinsignt product for network monitoring used for performance management

• A probeVM  has to be installed into each host (ESXi) where the application component is installed
• These probes send DPI information on network traffic and sends the information to AppInsight server
• Login into app insight as admin and install probe into the host
• Choose the proper switch and switch to monitor traffic