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.

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

Allied Telesis has a policy of staying close to upstream and pushing back changes:

“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.”

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.

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.

Allied Telesis is also involved with OpenDaylight and other controllers.

Allied Telesis will likely join the nascent Faucet

Foundation.

For more information about OpenFlow at Allied Telesis, visit the Allied Telesis website.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro music in this episode is Drive, featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper music is Yeah Ant featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro music is Space

Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.