NFV in the NREN Community through GN3+ (and beyond…!) Michael Enrico CTO, DANTE Future Internet Assembly 2014 Athens, Thursday 20th March 2014

Agenda A bit on GÉANT (the network)… … which has been reloaded! A bit on GÉANT (GN3Plus, the project)… … which has also been reloaded! GÉANT (the community)… … has been reloaded (and expanded) through the GÉANT Innovation Programme including the GÉANT Open Calls Where is the NFV in GÉANT?

But first a word on DANTE Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe A UK-based not-for-profit limited liability company Created and owned by a number of European NRENs DANTE plan, build and manage pan-European R&E networks on behalf of the NRENS in Europe Started in 1993 Based in Cambridge, UK Currently ~ 70 staff (many nationalities) Turnover ~ €45M per annum

What is GÉANT? (more than just a network…) GÉANT is co-funded by Europe’s NRENs and the European Commission (EC) under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) Project Partners are 38 European NRENs, TERENA and DANTE > 350 (project) staff work in GÉANT across Europe Wide range of adv services (inc. BoD & IPv6) 50,000 km network infrastructure on 44 routes 25 European POPs 12,000 km of dark fibre on 18 routes Widely diversified footprint Serves 50 million users 10,000 institutions Across 43 European countries

Backbone Network Architecture (The familiar GÉANT “tubemap” hides detail…) IE BE SK UK DE ES DK AT HU GR EE LV LT RO BG TR IL MK RS HR SI NL FR CH IT CZ PL MT CY ME EE LV DK RU LT IE UK BY NL PL BE DE CZ UA LU SK AT MD FR CH HU SI HR RS RO IT ME BG MK PT ES TR GR MT CY IL

Backbone Network Architecture (Major upgrade & rationalisation…) IE BE SK UK DE ES DK AT HU GR EE LV LT RO BG TR IL MK RS HR SI NL FR CH IT CZ PL MT CY ME Fibre Leased Circuits “Routerless POPs” “Fully featured POPs” Off fibre net POPs IP/MPLS only POPs NREN POPs Circuits over GÉANT Leased circuits DWDM TDM (SDH) IP/MPLS Fibre Leased Circuits NREN POPs DWDM Off fibre POPs Converged Packet Transport Platform Leased circuits On fibre POPs Cutting a rather long story short… (achitectural studies, workshops, consensus building, procurement, rollout, convergence…) RU PT LU (Routerless POPs)

New hardware platform choices Optical Transport Platform Packet Transport & Routing Platform DTN-X from Infinera Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) based 500Gbit/s “superchannels” with OTN switching MX 960 from Juniper Flexible & powerful IP/MPLS switching and routing platform

What do we mean by SDN ready? Various versions of the JUNOS operating system for the Juniper MX have supported the OpenFlow wire protocol interface for some time e.g. generally available (and supported) JUNOS 13.3 (R1.6) with the addition of another package (jsdn-i386-13.3R1.6) supports OpenFlow wire protocol v1.0 this is currently being tried out in the DANTE lab in Cambridge not yet out in the (GÉANT) field Infinera have their Open Transport Switch (OTS) agent that can be installed on the DTN-X platform this supports various versions of the OpenFlow wire protocol (some with proprietary extensions, some without) this allows circuits to be provisioned in the “Transport SDN” paradigm again, not yet out in the GÉANT field Note: many (non-packet) transport switch vendors claim to have been using “SDN” (in some sense) for a long time by dint of the fact that they have been using centralised NMS-based management since time began…

GÉANT OpenFlow Facility (GOFF) Vienna Zagreb Amsterdam London Frankfurt OPEN V-Switch

TaaS (Dynamic Packet Testbed) from GN3 plus SA2 Ethernet Switch “B” VLAN “L1” Testbed “Alpha” Description X86 Server “C” Virtual Circuit “L3” VLAN “L2” Virtual Machine “A” Network testbed concept to test novel idea User logs in, and builds a testbed description via a web GUI frontend to their Testbed Control Agent TCA Resource A port p0, p1; Resource B port out1, out2; Adjacency B/out1==A/p0; Testbed Description Doc fed to RM p1 p0 B TCA RM L1 L2 src dst dst src p1 if0 A Z C A L3 Researcher has a brilliant idea if2 p2 Resource Manager Allocates resources and sets up the testbed control plane Testbed is activated and user controls it via the TCA

SA6: Service Management and Operation INNOVATION PROGRAMME JRA1: Network Architectures for Horizon 2020 SA1: Core Backbone Services SA2: Testbeds as a Service JRA2: Technology Testing for Specific Service Applications SA3: Network Service Delivery SA4: Network Support Services JRA3: Identity & Trust Services for GÉANT Services GÉANT Open Calls SA5: Application Services SA7: Support to Clouds SA6: Service Management and Operation NA1: Management NA2: Comms & Promotion NA3: Status & Trends NA4: Int & Business Dev

Open Call Projects funded….. Applications & Tools Authentication OPEN CALL PROJECTS Network Architecture and Optical Projects SDN: Software Defined Networking

GÉANT Open Call  NFV  SDN  SDN  SDN Applications and Tools A range of activities designed to investigate how the GÉANT network can support advanced research activities and projects; ARES: Advanced Networking for the EU genomic research CEOVDS: Cross-site Evaluation of an OpenFlow-assisted Video-on-Demand Distribution Service eMusic: Using GÉANT dynamic circuits to support remote collaboration in musical education and eCulture NSI-CONTEST: Network Service Interface Conformance Test Suite  NFV  SDN  SDN  SDN

GÉANT Open Call Authentication Secure identity and authentication is essential to get maximum value from distributed systems. These projects help support secure end-to-end authentication of systems and people. CLASSe: Cloud-ABFAB Federation Services in eduroam GEANT-Trustbroker: New Federation Services and Protocols for Dynamically Building Trust in the R&E Community HEXAA: Higher Education External Attribute Authorities MEAL: Multidomain eduroam across LTE SENSE: Secure Enterprise Networks finally Simple and Easy WoT4LoA: Web of Trust based Level of Assurance enhancement

GÉANT Open Call  SDN Network Architecture and Optical Projects Looking forward towards future generations of networking technologies, these projects study future networking systems. COFFEE: Coherent Optical system Field-trial For spectral Efficiency Enhancement ICOF: International Clock Comparisons via Optical Fiber IRINA: Investigating RINA as the next generation GEANT and NREN network architecture MoMoT: Multi-Domain Optical Modelling Tool REACTION: Research and Experimental Assessment of Control plane archiTectures for In-Operation flexgrid Network re-optimization  SDN

GÉANT Open Call By definition!  SDN SDN- Software Defined Networking Software Defined Networking allows greater network flexibility and the potential for new networking paradigms to meet new networking demands. AUTOFLOW: Autonomic OpenFlow CoCo: On Demand Community Connection Service for eScience Collaboration DREAMER: Distributed REsilient sdn Architecture MEeting carrier grade Requirements DyNPaC: Dynamic Path Computation Framework MINERVA: Implementing network coding in transport networks to increase availability MOTE: Multi-Domain OpenFlow Topology Exchange By definition!  SDN

ARES Project – implements “NFV” University of Perugia & GGB Implementing an advanced CDN using NSIS to signal the instantiation of (virtual) resources when and where they are needed to help deliver content

SDN/NFV – where are the users? Much of the effort in this field is driven by the possibilities offered by the technology – not an immediate user demand This was also the case for Lambda networking and IPv6 in the early days of these services. Today, however, everyone recognizes the need for these services. Having said this, the users are there already – from radio astronomy and other types of massive data transfer to more complex service scenarios e.g. advanced & dynamic CDN service example shown previously but this applies to many more applications than just the genomics in this particular case The combination of Cloud Services and SDN/NFV will be increasingly interesting, and GÉANT can expect to serve as a showcase for the rest of society, when cloud vendors with NREN customers start making substantive use of SDN/NFV technologies.

Summary SDN/NFV (“Software-isation”) is The next technology wave to re-define networking… …and make it sexy once again (;-) Important as a forefront technology A field where GÉANT really can contribute JRAs, open calls (next round ~2016), TaaS(es) A challenge to implement across multiple domains/operators GÉANT service area (MD) ideal for this (with caveats…) An area for R&D activities for years to come

Thank you for listening Questions? michael.enrico@dante.net