ProgrammableFlow Technical Deep Dive

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This free webinar sponsored by NEC Corporation of America describes the benefits and technical details of ProgrammableFlow®, the first production-grade commercial implementation of an OpenFlow-based Software Defined Network with a controller and data center switches.

If you are a network architect, designer or sales/support engineer working in a large data center environment, considering deployment of new equipment, or a vendor change, you simply have to attend this webinar.

Webinar Content

ProgrammableFlow Principles of Operation

This section will briefly revisit the principles of OpenFlow networking (central control plane with distributed flow-based data plane), and map them to the physical topology of a typical ProgrammableFlow network.

The discussion of the physical topology will focus on various networks ProgrammableFlow needs for its operation (OpenFlow network, OpenFlow control network, management network and cluster interconnect network) and the redundant nature of the ProgrammableFlow Controller. You’ll also learn how ProgrammableFlow release 4 integrates virtual switches with the physical network.

The final part of the section will describe the topology discovery using ProgrammableFlow Link Discovery Protocol (PLDP) and the basics of the flow routing functionality of the ProgrammableFlow network.

Virtual Networking

The core of the ProgrammableFlow controller (PFC) functionality is its Virtual Network capabilities – the ability to implement a rich set of multi-tenant L2/L3 virtual networks, including basic packet filters, traffic steering, and quality-of-service.

This section will describe the Virtual Tenant Network (VTN) principles, bridging and routing functionality (IPv4 and IPv6) in VTN networks, packet filters and traffic steering (redirection), and mapping of external devices (physical or virtual) to VTN interfaces, made even simpler with new functionality planned for ProgrammableFlow release 4.

Quality-of-Service

Even though OpenFlow doesn’t support extensive QoS functionality, the ProgrammableFlow solution uniquely provides a rich set of QoS tools, including traffic classification, policing and marking – all of them described in this section.

Scalability Tools

Flooding of multicast/broadcast and unknown unicast frames is the final scalability challenge every layer-2 network is facing. This section will focus on several tools you can use in ProgrammableFlow networks, including ARP snooping, ARP proxy and flooding policing.

Configuration Interfaces

This section will briefly describe the mechanisms one can use to program the ProgrammableFlow controller, from classic CLI to REST API (WebAPI) that you can use to change PFC’s behavior with JSON or XML requests, and OpenStack Quantum API.

Typical Use Case

The final section of the webinar will describe a typical use case – a self-contained IaaS network offering multi-tenant compute, network and storage resources.

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Target Audience

If you are a network architect, designer or sales/support engineer working in a large data center environment, considering deployment of new equipment, or a vendor change, you simply have to attend this webinar.

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