episode-45.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<item xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd">
  <title>Faucet and OpenFlow at Allied Telesis</title>
  <guests>Tony Van der Peet</guests>
  <description>
    <p>
      Tony van der Peet is Chief Architect at Allied Telesis.  In this episode,
      he speaks about using OpenFlow on Allied Telesis networking hardware for
      enterprise SDN.
    </p>

    <p>
      The Allied Telesis implementation of OpenFlow is based on Open vSwitch.
      According to Tony:
    </p>

    <blockquote>
    ``We've tried really from the word `go' to develop the
      most generic OpenFlow switch that we can, and obviously Open vSwitch is a
      very fully featured version of OpenFlow.  The trick, then, is how to
      integrate that with your hardware solution.  The solution we've come up
      with is to let Open vSwitch do what it does best, which is to manage the
      tables, and to work out what needs to happen to a particular flow, and
      for us to then take that and to translate it as best we can into our
      hardware tables.''
    </blockquote>

    <p>
      Most Open vSwitch downstream projects use an official Open vSwitch
      release as their base, but Allied Telesis uses the tip of master:
    </p>

    <blockquote>
      ``I discovered a long time ago that all the good stuff was on master, so
      we had a policy very early on of going to the tip of master at the time
      we felt it was right to do an upgrade from upstream.  Sometimes that
      means we take a bit of rough with the smooth, but we're prepared for
      that.''
    </blockquote>

    <p>
      Allied Telesis has a policy of staying close to upstream and pushing back
      changes:
    </p>

    <blockquote>
      ``We do have an active policy of pushing patches upstream on any of the
      projects we're associated with.  We have done a couple of patches back up
      to Open vSwitch and we do have a bunch more, and I've already discussed
      with you the idea that we might push up some of our patches we've done
      recently to give us conformance to the ONF official conformance
      program.''
    </blockquote>

    <p>
      Tony describes Allied Telesis's experience of the ONF conformance testing
      process.  They began by writing their own versions of all 300+ tests that
      the process includes.  Writing the tests took about 1 hour per test, on
      average, so this was a significant investment in time.  The investment
      paid off because it gave Tony and Allied Telesis experience with the
      tests and enough information to intelligently argue with the conformance
      lab.
    </p>

    <p>
      Tony became involved with Faucet because of the New Zealand connection:
      both Tony and Faucet are based there.  Allied Telesis appreciates how
      Faucet as an open source project allows a way to show an OpenFlow use
      case for its switches.
    </p>

    <p>
      Allied Telesis is also involved with OpenDaylight and other controllers.
    </p>

    <p>
      Allied Telesis will likely join the nascent <a
      href="http://conference.faucet.nz/slides/Chris%20Lorier%20-%20FAUCET%20Architecture.pptx">Faucet
      Foundation</a>.
    </p>

    <p>
      For more information about OpenFlow at Allied Telesis, visit the <a
      href="https://www.alliedtelesis.com/">Allied Telesis website</a>.
    </p>

    <p class="attribution">
      OVS Orbit is produced by <a href="mailto:blp@ovn.org">Ben Pfaff</a>.  The
      intro music in this episode is <a
      href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/AlexBeroza/43098">Drive</a>,
      featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex.  The bumper
      music is <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/42100">Yeah Ant</a>
      featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck.  The outro
      music is <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/43005">Space
      Bazooka</a> featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid.  All
      content is licensed under a Creative Commons <a
      href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Attribution 3.0
      Unported (CC BY 3.0)</a> license.
    </p>
  </description>
  <pubDate>Tue, 31 Oct 2017 03:24:41 GMT</pubDate>
</item>