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

2. 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?

3. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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)

8. 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

9. 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-i R1.6) 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…

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

11. 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

12. 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

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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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.

20. 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

21. Thank you for listening Questions?