Building CloudWhere SDN Could Help

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SDN Workshop, Zurich, 30.October 2013

Simon Leinensimon.leinen@switch.ch

© 2013 SWITCH 2

• Built ~10-node Ceph+OpenStack clusterBCC – “building cloud competence”

• Services:– VMs for various researchers and internal testers– File synchronization server for ~500 end users

in “Cloud Shared Storage” usability tests – ownCloud vs. PowerFolder

• Networking:– 2*10GE per server– 6*10GE on front-end servers, which route– Two Brocade “ToR” switches with TRILL-based

multi-chassis multipath, L2+VLANs– 2*10GE towards backbone

SWITCH “Cloud” Experience (so far)

© 2013 SWITCH 3

Goals:• Offer “Dropbox-like” service to entire community• Offer “IaaS” services (VM/storage) to researchers• A first example of “scientific SaaS”• Stable and efficient operations• Scalability, both architectural and economical

Next Step: ~2 * 2 racks with room to scale

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• Beyond a few racks, we need some sort of “aggregation layer” beyond the ToR. There are multiple approaches:– Traditional with large aggregation switch (doubled for redundancy)– Modern with leaf/spine design <- cost-effective “commodity” kit

• How can servers make use of parallelism in the fabric?– Smart L2 switches (TRILL, Multi-chassis LAG etc.) – vendor lock-in?– L3 switches with hypervisor-based overlay à la Nicira OVP

Growing the Cloud: Internal fabric

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Never underestimate the power of Xeon

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chur.snabb.co

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Performance results

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• Traditionally, you have an access router at each site.• At >>10 Gb/s, this gets expensive.• Can we leverage the many cheap 10GEs we have on our

Intel servers?– Basic (BGP) routing/filtering functionality needed– Could peer directly with backbone routers in neighboring PoPs

Data Center/Backbone Interface

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• Offer customer institutions (university) VMs with IP address from the university’s range

• Somehow bridge/tunnel these VMs’ interfaces into the university’s campus network… so that they appear on the “right” side of the firewall– What are suitable mechanisms/interfaces at the campus side?

• Also, allow customers to build their own private networks within our cloud, i.e. between cloud-hosted VMs– This is now standard functionality in OpenStack/Neutron

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)