BBN Technologies today announced $10.5 million in NSF funding for large-scale prototype deployments of new networking technologies (Full Press Release). It is exciting to see a first generation of GENI research move from the laboratory to live networks across the continent.

Currently negotiations for on scope and amounts for the individual projects are ongoing and nothing is final yet. That being said the current plans are for a substantial part of the funding to be used in OpenFlow deployments at a number of universities and backbone networks. Schools previously mentioned as participating include Princeton, Rutgers, Clemson, Wisconsin, Indiana, Georgia Tech and University of Washington with NLR and Internet2 connecting them. A number of networking hardware vendors have committed to providing OpenFlow enabled switches and routers for the deployments. We’ll update you on the details as they are being announced.

In the men time congratulations and thanks to Chip Elliot (pictured to the right) and his team at the GPO for having taken another major step to move the GENI vision forward.

Enterprise GENI, the OpenFlow based Network Substrate that is part of the large-scale GENI effort funded is featured on the GENI home page today. GENI uses the FlowVisor with an added-on Aggregate Manager to virtualize a network. Recently at Stanford we demonstrated how to use eGENI together with PlanetLab, allowing control of both computing and network infrastructure through a single framework. For more information, have a look at the article.

Two weeks ago we had a great demo of OpenFlow at the third GENI Engineering Conference. Things we demonstrated included:

• A centrally controlled OpenFlow network with OpenFlow switches deployed at Stanford, Internet2 and JGN2plus in Japan.
• Virtual machine mobility at Stanford. You can see this in detail in the SIGCOMM Demo Video.
• Flow Dragging. David Underhill created a fantastic UI that allows you to change the path packets take in the network by dragging the flow with the mouse to new routers an example video is shown below.
• Virtual machine mobility within JGN2plus and between Stanford and JGN2plus. A running virtual machine was migrated across the Pacific while hosts in Japan were communicating with it. The combination of OpenFlow and our controller allowed the virtual machine to change locations and maintain connectivity without changing IP address.

The demonstration OpenFlow network incorporated switches from (in alphabetical order) Cisco, HP, Juniper and NEC.

The slides for Nick’s talk before the demo are online here.

Thanks to Glen who was the technical lead on this demo, as well as to everyone else on the 30 person team from Stanford, HP, NEC, Internet2, Cisco and Juniper who made this a success.

Photo Gallery from the GEC Demo after the jump…

Tim Greene from Computerworld has a very nice article about OpenFlow, vendors that have implemented it and the demo at the GENI Engineering Conference. It is also up on Networkworld.

The GENI Demo just happened a few minutes ago, and it safe to say it was a huge success. We demostrated both virtual machine mobility as well as arbitrary flow routing. More exciting updates on OpenFlow coming soon.

Update: International coverage of OpenFlow in Japanese, Portuguese, Italias, Spanish, Polish and Swedish after the jump.

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We gave a short presentation of OpenFlow in the context of Enterprise GENI at the GENI CIO Meeting in Chicago today, and finished it with a live demo of the system running at Stanford. Everything worked very well, with the dashboard running in Chicago and us being able to demonstrate VM mobility and flow optimization (Thanks Glen and David U!).

There seems to be a lot of interests from University CIOs in OpenFlow as a potential tool for networking research. Specifically the ability to run production traffic and experimental traffic on the same switching hardware with good separation received a lot of questions. There seems to be a natural tension at Unviersities between networking researchers that want maximum flexibility, and the people operating the production network that want to keep everything stable and secure. An OpenFlow switch that separates OpenFlow and production traffic by VLAN seems to provide at least a partial solution to this problem.