Software Defined Networking (SDN) Introduction

hello again as you know I am you lied the computer guy in today's class is Software Defined Networking introduction so Software Defined Networking or Sdn so this is one of the coolest things to come along in quite a long time Sdn is just absolutely amazing and right now we are at the cutting edge of it so if you hear about Sdn or Software Defined Networking the first thing that you should keep in mind is we are at the bleeding edge of Sdn so if you're sitting there at the end of this class if you're thinking well Eli I know I don't know any equipment that uses this I don't know how to configure equipment to use this don't worry the reality is most of this stuff really won't be deployed into most of your environments probably for another two or three years but once it does get deployed into your environment it is just going to be absolutely awesome so the idea behind Sdn or software-defined networking is the idea of pulling the intelligence of your networking away from the hardware so we have been doing this for a long time now if you look at sands so back in the old days if we wanted to store data on the network we had a file server that had hard drives most likely a raid configuration we store data so one box was responsible for everything one box contained the data one box contained the hard drives one box contained the operating system one box can train contain the access control list the whole nine yards if anything happened to the hard drives the all that data was gone it was unusable that the power supply died it was gone basically that that storage device was unusable then came sands or storage area networks all of a sudden the physical equipment that stored the data was separated from the control mechanisms that controlled how the data was stored so when you're dealing with sands you basically have dumb ish data storage devices and then some kind of management system that controls where data goes to when we went to virtualization for computers again originally the computers were installed on to the hardware on to the box if anything happened to a power supply if anything happened to that box the entire system went down now we have virtualization so basically all these instances of operating systems can flow from different pieces of hardware and as far as the operating system is concerned it doesn't care where it's apt so we've been going through this whole process of separating the intelligence from the hardware now one of the interesting parts in this process is that we have basically left networking equipment behind so we look at the networking equipment nowadays we're basically basically looking at the same stuff that I was looking at way back in 1999 the routers the switches routing protocols and so forth they have become faster they have bigger back planes they have bigger throughput but the actual intelligence mechanisms are basically the same they've added some qualities of service they've added some some little things but basically networking equipment has stayed the same well with Sdn or software-defined networking we are now going to networking what we have done to data storage and then computers we are pulling the intelligence off of the hardware we are making the networking equipment dumber but we're creating a management system to make the overall networking system much more intelligent so now we can be very nuanced control of our entire networking infrastructure at one control panel versus having to go in to individual little routers and switches and do different types of changes so in order to understand why Sdn is important let's go and let's go to my little digital whiteboard to kind of mix give you a little bit of a history lesson on where we are and how we got here so when we start talking about about networking and such so when we talk about like 1999 back back when I was really getting into computers back then well all we really cared about was the size of the pipe was it 1.5 megabits per second was it 8 megabits per second was it 5 megabits per second back in 1999 essentially we were transferring files so we were transferring pictures we are transferring entire video files we were transferring emails basically everything was a file so what we cared about back in 1999 time frame was speed how fast can we transfer entire files from point A to point B and that was speed and that is what we cared about back then because we were transferring files now let's fast forward to about 2005 right YouTube comes out Skype is now around voice over IP becomes a bigger deal digital surveillance becomes an issue so now once we start dealing with YouTube Skype voice voice over IP this video we are now doing real-time communication so real-time communication needs something different then simple transfer transfer of files so what real-time communication cares about is something called latency so before it was how fast we move a chunk of data from point A to point B with latency we now care how fast can we get individual packets from point A to point B because the more latency is the longer it takes for these individual packets the worse this real-time communication will work so if you hear something called you get ur jitter is usually because there is too much latency so in speed we were saying well this is a 10 megabit per second connection in latency we talk about like 20 one millisecond connection so that is what we were worried about in about 2005 now the issue is so before we were doing with file stuff and then we're dealing with with RTC real-time communications those are two separate things we dealt with it so with RTC we dealt what we we've dealt with latency and that is when we added to our networking equipment basically what is called QoS or quality of service what quality of service allowed is it allowed for the ability to prioritize packets so I could say a VoIP packet was more important than an FTP packet what that means is since the void packet needs less latency it will be moved down the pipe faster than the FTP packet so basically when we were dealing with RTC real-time communications in about the 2005 time frame that is when they really started pushing quality of service the prioritization of packets so first we had speed then we had QoS well now we get to the 2011 2012 2013 time friend and when we are dealing with our networking systems it is becoming more and more complicated so before we used to be able to say well FTP traffic is low priority and SEP traffic is high priority it was it was really easy to say well now as more and more devices are being connected to the network it is becoming to the point that sometimes FTP traffic is more important than a sip traffic sometimes a video traffic is more important than voice traffic and sometimes it's less important the problem is with the systems that we have with quality of service you can't dynamically configure this information you can say basically that one packet is more important than another but that's it you're done you can't program a program eclis state that at certain times an FTP traffic is more important than its zip traffic and other times sip traffic is more important than FTP traffic well that is where this Sdn or Software Defined Networking comes into play now we can dynamically model and shape our traffic depending on what we need to do so essentially what happens is the big thing is that we is that we separate networking into the control plane and to the data plane what this means is the data plane is what actually has all the switches and the routers that allow packets to go from point A to point B so the data plane is the switches the routers the bridges all that well then the control plane the control plane this is a set of management servers that communicate with all of the different networking equipment on the data plane and say right at this second how should data move through the data plane so you can say right at this second all sip traffic should have priority over FTP traffic and then two minutes from now you can say all SMTP traffic should have more priority over sip traffic from a control console you are able to control the entire network at one place that is why this is so awesome so the big thing with Sdn when we're talking about about software-defined networking is that we're separating out the different components of the networking infrastructure so that we can deal with them separately so the data plane the data section is again this is how we move data from point A to point B so we're dealing with routers we're dealing with switches we're dealing with bridges so on and so forth you also then have the services plane the services plane are things like the firewall what services are they're on a network and can you separate them from the physical equipment so again even right now if you're dealing with a firewall that firewall software is sitting on a physical piece of firewall hardware well the question is is hey can we have a piece of firewall hardware but then separate the service the actual firewall functionality off to a different server so it can deal with it more efficiently then you have what is called a control plane the control plane is the servers that do all the management for the services and the data and then you have something called the management plane and that is what controls and make sure all the the all the servers on the control paint plane function as they're supposed to so the idea with a software-defined networking is we're separating all this out because right now again if you deal with a router you have the hardware and the intelligence and the programming all on that one device well what if we can separate the router hardware from the router intelligence from the router programming then if we do this it allows us to manage our systems much more easily now the question that you're gonna be having is you're gonna be sitting there you're like well you know I don't okay so we're separating out all these components that can so can software-defined networking allows us to easily shape traffic in real time but you know you like why would we be doing this right you know if we go out and we buy really big powerful networking hardware why would we be shaping traffic in real time you know what's the point of this well let me let me give you an example of why you may want to shape traffic in real time so the issue now is that whenever you set up your network in the real world basically everything has its own boundaries or boxes so we create the voice over IP network and that voice over IP network only has so much bandwidth and right beside it we will create this digital surveillance network and it will only have so much bandwidth and right beside that we create the computers basically the server and the computer network and it has so much bandwidth now this bandwidth may be limited by quality of service this ban limit Bamm whit may be limited by VLANs but essentially we set up this network and every single type of service that's going on in our network has a limited amount of bandwidth that's allocated to it now sometimes it uses all that bandwidth and sometimes it uses a very little port very small portion of it so sometimes the the voice over IP network is using 70% of the allocated bandwidth and other times is only using one percent well if you set this up with VLANs and all the other things you may not be able to use all of that bandwidth that is not currently being used by the voice over IP system so what would be nice is if we had an infrastructure that was created where again in real time we could prioritize traffic so we could simply have a one gigabit per second pipe and instead of sectioning it off for all these different services we could just say we have this entire pipe that is allocated to us all the time and then depending upon our current needs different services that are running over that network will receive different priority now again the question becomes well well Eli I don't I don't understand what why would this be important well imagine again remember we're in technology so we have to be thinking about in the future we have to be thinking about three years from now what do we want to be doing with our network so as we know being able to send high-definition video takes up a lot of bandwidth so being able to stream high-definition video is a bandwidth hog here's an example of why Sdn might be useful in the future in the real world so as we all know you know there have been these school shootings there have been workplace violence of lately so imagine you work in a rather large building imagine you work in a building with a thousand employees so a thousand different workstations now imagine that some pissed off spouse walks in to that building with a handgun saying I want to know where my wife is right well you know in the movies all the police come out and he gets shot and that's bad right well in the real world right in the real world it's best if employees can basically get out of the building be able to avoid this person as he stalks through the building trying to find whoever it is he's trying to find so imagine if you had some kind of a video alert system where as the person walked into the building and there was a problem you can actually stream from your surveillance system to every single device on the network the current location of the intruder and the high-definition video of what he is doing at this second it'll be almost like out of the movie so you can see okay I see he's around the corner and I see he's looking in the other direction so let's run behind him right well in order to be able to stream out that high-definition video to all of those hosts on the network that is going to take up a tremendous amount of bandwidth if you have a network that is configured as modern networks are basically it will Co and it won't be able to work right because the overall bandwidth might be enough but because of quality of service because of division of the network so on and so forth basically when you try to stream out high-definition video to a thousand different workstations the the the network is going to have a heart attack well imagine if you had software-defined networking in one instance you could turn the entire network over to being able to stream that video to all the computers on the network so basically you could press a button or it could happen program quickly we're SMTP get shutoff void get shutoff FTP is shut off SMB gets shut off any protocol that is not not with that that video stream gets shut off and so the video stream has the prioritization so it can go out to all those computers now imagine the police run in they grab the via that they grab the the angry spouse they shove them against the wall they they put the handcuffs on them and they walk them out the door now imagine with Sdn Software Defined Networking again with the press of the button you can turn off that video stream and then you can give priority to all the voice over IP traffic so that all the employees and the office can call their loved ones to tell them that they are ok that's what Software Defined Networking allows you to do it allows you to automatically allocate and be the shape traffic depending upon your current needs and that I say guys yeah see if you don't think that's cool I don't know what is so what you do with that the idea behind all of this again is you're going to be separating out the networking components to different planes so you have the data plane which contains all the hardware and the basic mechanisms for being able to forward data from point A to point B you then have this services plane now why this is important is because think about firewalls couldn't they work more efficiently if you can cluster them or if you can use the power of Zeon servers in order to do all of the firewall stuff that you want to do instead of instead of having a firewall and instead of all the CPU and processing power being on that firewall imagine if you could have the power of of them cloud and you can cluster 10 Xeon servers to be to deal with the firewall service wouldn't you be able to do more powerful things and have packets being able to be processed much more quickly then you have the control plane so what the control plane allows you to do is the control plane is the management console so you can just sit there and you can have one interface that allows you to automatically be able to configure all of the networking equipment on the network so instead of having to go to this switch and that switch in this router and that router in order to change quality of service for a a specific protocol you could simply say I want protocol 25 to have maximum priority now click and all of a sudden port 25 across the network has the maximum priority you don't go have to go to all of those different little pieces of equipment to make changes and then the management plane is what kind of manages that control plane because with the control plane you can now do things like have servers that man that control all of the networking equipment and you can have clusters of servers much like you would have a cluster of Active Directory servers now the final part when you're dealing with Sdn you will hear probably hear of something called open flow so there is a control protocol for how you control all those networking devices so the question then becomes okay you have the control plane the control plane is what controls the networking devices but you actually have to communicate with those networking devices right just like you have routing protocols just like you have rip or open shut open the shortest path first a protocol like that well if you're going to be using a control plane to be able to talk to the data equipment you're also going to need a protocol to deal with that that is called the control protocol and that is that's one of the things that would that's called open flow that that you may run into so this is just a basic overview of what software-defined networking again is again this is one of those things that's been being pushed out over the past year two years it's really not a big thing it's not a huge thing and enterprise is quite yet but it is something that you should be looking at and especially if you want to be dealing with networking equipment that you should be thinking about how to deploy into your network within the near future again somewhere between the two to four year mark now once you go out and you start researching software-defined networking one of the things that you're going to find is that basically software-defined networking is where voice over IP was oh I don't know in about 2005 so basically we have all the major companies have decided that Sdn software-defined networking is a great thing cisco juniper al terrace HP they all they all think Sdn is the future the problem is right here right now right the second all those companies have a different view of the future so if you decide to go out and start buying equipment just realize this again with a voice over IP I remember when everybody was deploying voice over IP and there are a whole bunch of different views of how voice over IP systems should be built and again with hands with all things there were winners and there were losers with Sdn right now just realize that if you go out to start buying equipment for it there are going to be winners and there are going to be used losers juniper has its own view of how s the end should work cisco has its view of how sdsu work all of these views at some point in three years they will solidify around some standardized model but right here right at the second they have not solidified around that model so just be careful make sure you do a lot of research because this is one of those times that if you buy this equipment and you make the wrong decision in two years you may be having to do a very quick refresh cycle because the equipment you have doesn't do what you want it to do so this was the overall this was just an introduction to software-defined networking again the concept is is that you separate the intelligence from the hardware you separate the services from the hardware the hardware the routers the switches the bridges the wireless access points much more dumb than that control plane that control system can then control all of those networking devices again just like a server can control all of the a windows 2012 server can control windows 8 computers that are on the network so from one interface you're able to control all these things absolutely awesome absolutely amazing it just makes my little little geek heart go pitter-patter so this was the class software-defined networking introduction as you know I a lie the computer guy I enjoy teaching this class and look forward to seeing the next one

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 195,645

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Id: 2BJyIIIYU8E

Length: 25min 13sec (1513 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2013