OpenFlow on NEC
October 2nd, 2009, dtalayco in OpenFlow Blog
NEC switches have been supporting OpenFlow since the earliest deployment on an experimental network here at Stanford. This started with prototype development in November of 2008 and a more complete deployment started in April of 2009. NEC provided the first hardware accelerated OpenFlow switch and hence arguably has one of the most mature OpenFlow implementations.
Two types of switches from the IP8800 series — the IP8800/S3640-24T2XW and the IP8800/S3640-48T2XW — are currently deployed including both 24 and 48 port GE switches, each with 2 10-gigabit ports. A total of five switches are used in the immediate OpenFlow deployment here in the Gates building on Stanford’s campus.
VLANs have been deployed on the switches to differentiate between OpenFlow and non-OpenFlow traffic. Within the OpenFlow category, both “production” and “experimental” networks are configured. The OpenFlow production network serves many researchers with normal network connectivity providing email, web and the usual network resources. The experimental networks provide segmented access to such projects as OpenPipes (PDF) and OpenRoads (PDF) with development and demos running continuously.
The NEC switches support multiple virtual OpenFlow instances to be running on a physical switch, each with its own quota of flows. The switch hardware accelerates:
- Matching on the full OpenFlow 10-tuple.
- The L2 MAC destination address rewrite action.
- Forwarding to multiple output ports (multicasting).
The NEC switches have provided a stable platform carrying a large part of our local traffic. NEC has been very effective at ensuring that their switches support the latest OpenFlow specifications.