Open Network Featured Article

In networking, there’s speed and then there’s real speed.

Pica8, the one-stop source for white box networking, is embracing the latter as it has announced Table Type Patterns (TTP), a new functionality in its PicOS network operating system that overcomes limitations in OpenFlow scaling.

According to the company, with TTP, PicOS can scale to two million flows with Cavium’s XPliant switch ASIC, and to 256,000 flows with Broadcom’s (News - Alert) StrataXGS Tomahawk switch ASIC, enabling very large data center build-outs. For those unaware, typical TCAM flow capacity in the top-of-rack installed base today is between 1,000 and 2,000 flows, and with Pica8’s TTP implementation, production networks can scale 1,000 times more.

“More and more customers are deploying OpenFlow rules in conjunction with traditional Layer-2 / Layer-3 networks leveraging Pica8’s CrossFlow technology to provide greater agility and granular control of traffic engineering policies,” the company said in a release announcing the upgrade. “With TTP capability, customers are able to take SDN and OpenFlow to a broader scale, and deploy it across a wide range of data center applications including hybrid cloud, disaster recovery, and network monitoring.”

Insiders explained why the change was made.

“There have been concerns voiced that OpenFlow doesn’t scale to support large data center applications,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., and research director for data center, cloud, and SDN at IHS (News - Alert). “Pica8’s TTP implementation removes an important concern for OpenFlow-based SDN deployments and allows customers to build large data centers with white box switches and OpenFlow.”

TTP defines how tables are set up in a switch, which an SDN controller can program via the OpenFlow switch protocol. The development of a TTP-based approach has been motivated by several factors, including to maximize the available capacity, to better accommodate heterogeneity of existing hardware switches, to enable future innovation in hardware switches through more seamless SDN application development, and to enable granular and automated communication between application / controller developers and switch vendors.