NoviFlow shines during live Open Source demos at Australian SDN Event in April

Three days of SDN Applications Down Under With live demos of FAUCET, CASTOR and other Open Source Projects

Things are looking up for SDN Open Source Software Down Under!

As a follow-on to the ONF’s SDN Down Under symposium this past December, in April UNSW (the University of New South Wales) and CSIRO hosted three days of events on Open Source in SDN.

First was a meeting of the ANZSDN Alliance, where the ONF’s managing director, Dan Pitt led a discussion of the lay of the land with SDN products and deployments around the globe. A key topic discussed was the role of researchers in advancing the SDN cause and the opportunities for students.

The second day was a DemoFest, showing five exciting projects, two of which include live demos featuring NoviFlow’s NoviSwitch products: Project CASTOR, an SDN-based exchange point, by CSIRO and Data61, and Project FAUCET, an SDN-based enterprise network with full L2 capabilities,  by REANNZ & Google.

Third was the SDN hackathon, held at UNSW and CSIRO and sponsored by ONF, Optus, Aarnet, and NoviFlow, which drew over 25 entrants in six teams, three of which built applications on NoviFlow’s NoviSwithes.

The SDN DemoFest, was hosted by CSIRO/ Data61 and held at the CSIRO ICT Centre in Marsfield near Sydney. Five Open Source SDN applications were presented, and four were demoed live, two featuring NoviFlow’s NoviSwitch. Projects presented:

1) CASTOR SDN-based exchange point by CSIRO/Data61 (code soon to be hosted at OpenSourceSDN.org): for public peering between autonomous systems at an IXP (a major improvement over simple L2 peering), and private peering for enterprises accessing cloud services. The application was written on ONOS and demonstrated using a NoviFlow switch, four routers (two Cisco, one Pica8 with Vandervecken, one NoviFlow with Vandervecken), four hosts (Ubuntu), two traffic generators (Spirent), and two BGP route servers (VMs) for public peering. OpenFlow provides fine-grained monitoring and traffic-based charging.

2) L3 Interconnects using Software-Based Router by IIX/Console: this “Internet bypass” application leverages CloudRouter and tackles the challenge of automating L3 and takes Arpit Gupta’s work on iSDX at Princeton a step further. Actual details of how they did this were not released. The team is based in Sydney and Santa Clara.

3) FAUCET SDN-based enterprise network by REANNZ & Google: Josh Bailey described creating real enterprise networks using Faucet (an L2 stack distribution built on Ryu and OpenFlow) with easy-to-add filters and security. Demoed using NoviSwitch.

4) Zodiac: The world’s smallest SDN switch by Northbound Networks: an entry-level ($99 Australian) OpenFlow Switch made in Melbourne.  Aimed at consumer applications, it runs line rate at 100 Mb.

5) SDN for the home network by NetworkSeer: a new model for delivering SDN-based home networks: a home wifi router (TP-Link) with OpenWRT and OVS. A web-based user interface was shown to allow all sorts of monitoring and control.

The SDN Hackathon was sponsored by the ONF, Optus, AARnet, and NoviFlow, and drew over 25 entrants in six teams, using either the Zodiac switch or the NoviFlow switch. Most teams used the Ryu controller, and they had only 24 hours to code their applications from scratch! The outcomes were presented at the DemoFest and three of the five winning projects were developed using NoviFlow’s NoviSwitches:

Special corporate prize: Brocade Networks for a segment routing application (SRoOF – segment routing over OpenFlow) running on top of ODL and migrating the MPLS control plane to an SDN controller application. The application was written in Python over OpenDaylight governing two NoviFlow switches and 10 Mininet switches.

First prize: undergraduates from UNSW for a parental control application running over Ryu using Zodiac switches; cleanly accomplished by students who the day before did not even know what DNS was!

Second prize: grad students from UNSW and researchers from CSIRO for video traffic characterization, understand its type (Netflix, SD, HD, UHD) and origin (mobile, web) and other characteristics (bandwidth, users); the application was built on Faucet & Ryu running on NoviFlow switches, and they actually added a sixth OpenFlow table to Faucet’s five.

Third prize: a team from Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) for a fine-grained mirroring application, using Faucet & Ryu on NoviFlow with five tables and flexible match fields; replicating the flow to one or more other.

Fourth prize: grad students from UNSW for a smart parental controller that restricts access to certain websites and emails the parents when someone tries to access any website on a blacklist (or whitelist). The application runs on Ryu and Zodiac.

Major kudos go to Vijay Sivaraman at UNSW and Craig Russell at CSIRO for organizing and holding these events, as well as to David Wilde at AARnet for their direct support, to Ian Welch (VUW), Josh Bailey (Google), and Chris Lorier (REANNZ), and to Payam Motallebi (Optus) who offered to create some internships for the participating students!

Overall, it was a great event for our SDN champions down under, and for the global SDN community who will also benefit from their amazing contributions to SDN Open Source Software!