Introduction to Bare metal switching/routing
HEPIA 2018/2019
Mickaël Hoerdt
Contenu
- Introduction
- Bare Metal Switching
- Cumulus Linux
Introduction
The OpenCompute Project (OCP)
- 2009 : Facebook growing exponentially.
- Facebook starts a two years project to re-design its data centers.
- Everything is re-thought from scratch
- From hardware chips to server software stacks.
- Goal : reduce costs and energy consumption.
- 2011 : Facebook shares the design and architecture to the public.
- The open compute project is opened to other industrial actors.
- 2013 : Projet starts to re-design data-center networking.
Growth in Cloud Networking at Facebook
OpenCompute Networking
- Fully disaggregated and open networking HW & SW
- Operating System - Linux based operating systems & developpers tools
- Fully automated configuration management
- Software Defined Networking (SDN)
OpenCompute Networking Interesting Outcomes
- 2013 : Cumulus Linux.
- 2014 : Facebook publishes the Wedge network switch architecture
- 2019 : HP, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Juniper, Nokia, Lenovo, Microsoft, Broadcom, IBM and Google are now members of the Open Compute Project.
Bare Metal Switching/Routing
Main Idea : An Open Network Devices Eco-system
versus
Proprietary network devices vs Open Network devices
- Proprietary Network devices
- Slow pace of innovation
- Lack of control
- Expensive
- Open network devices
- Rapid Innovation : HW and SW are no longer tighly coupled
- Control and Choice : HW and SW can be chosen independently
- Less Costly : Share the same software for multiple HW vendors
From Open servers to Open Networks
Uses Cases
- LinkedIn Latency Issue
- Spotify SDN Internet Router
- ScpiPass OpenFlow 100 Gbs DMZ Firewall and IDS
Reference model
Cumulus Linux
What is it ?
- An operating system for network devices based on Gnu/Linux.
Main features
- Cumulus Linux is Linux based on a Debian distribution
- You can run your usual server applications.
- You can develop your own scripts.
- You can manage it the same way as a server.
- You can install Linux Applications.
- Cumulus Linux runs on industrial L3 switches.
- Thanks to partnership with HW vendors.
- Major differentiator with software only switches : Network HW acceleration.
- Line rate switching with Linux in the Control plane.
Linux Style Operation
- If you know how to manage a Linux server with the terminal, operating a Cumulus network device is very familiar.
- Bash for interactive session and scripting.
- Vi/Nano to edit debian network specific configurations files
- You can still use Nclu for a classical network style interactive CLI.
- See Lab 2 for an hand-on experience.