Tag Archives: Software Defined Networking

Juniper Northstar — WAN-SDN Controller

Cisco, Juniper, Networking, NFV, SDN, , , , , ,

Biggest misconception I think currently with SDN is that in order to run SDN we need to have OpenvSwitch equivalent switch supporting Openflow protocol between Controller and Switch. Most software vendors are promoting their software under this category however Hardware vendors who have spent considerable money on building hardware platforms are not just selling switches supporting Openflow. They are using SDN to come up with other applications which are centrally controlling the network and influencing the network from single point but not using Openflow protocol.

Juniper has one of the similar product under WAN–SDN controller category named Northstar. I just happen to assess it recently for my Telco.

Northstar comes in two flavours, Controller and Planner. Controller enables granular visibility and control of IP/MPLS tunnels in large service provider and enterprise networks.

Northstar Planner is more of modelling tool which can help you in understanding the behaviour of new LSP addition, deletion, failure of node/link etc. on your network before you actually provision the network.

The NorthStar Controller relies on PCEP (Path Computation Element Protocol) to deploy a path between the PCC routers. The path setup itself is performed through RSVP-TE signaling, which is enabled in the network and allows labels to be assigned from an ingress router to the egress router. Signaling is triggered by ingress routers in the core of the network. The PCE client runs on the routers by using a version of the Junos that supports PCEP.

The NorthStar Controller provisions PCEP in all PE devices (PCCs) and uses PCEP to retrieve the current status of the existing tunnels (LSPs) that run in the network. By providing a view of the whole network state and bandwidth demand in your network, the NorthStar Controller is able to compute optimal paths and provide the attributes that the PCC uses to signal the LSP.

Example Topology

Northstar Controller Topology

If your network supports Point to Multipoint LSPs, then you need minimum of 15.1F6 version on your ingress PE to view P2MP LSPs on Northstar controller however Egress PE can be on any version. Northstar initiates an iBGP-Link state session between itself and Ingress PE and PCEP attributes are shared over this session.

Home Page:

Northstar Controller_Home Page

With Northstar, we can view all the LSPs in network from the point of view of Ingress PE supporting PCEP and from there on we can initiate an LSP and delegate LSP from PE to Controller to manage it.

Northstar lets you create single LSP, multiple LSPs at once and even diverse LSP by site or link which could be very useful in case of primary backup paths in order to protect against single source of failure.

Diverse LSP Provisioning

Northstar Controller_Provision Diverse LSPs

There are three types of TE LSPs used with PCEP

  • CLI-controlled LSPs—The LSPs that do not have the lsp-external-controller pccd statement configured are called CLI-controlled LSPs. Although these LSPs are under local router control, the PCC updates the connected PCE with information about the CLI-controlled LSPs during the initial LSP synchronization process.
  • PCE-controlled LSPs—The LSPs that have the lsp-external-controller pccd statement configured are called PCE-controlled LSPs or delegated LSPs. The PCC delegates the PCC-initiated LSPs to the main PCE for external path computation.
  • Externally-provisioned LSPs (or PCE-initiated LSPs)—The LSPs that have the lsp-provisioning statement configured are called PCE-initiated LSPs. A PCE-initiated LSP is dynamically created by an external PCE; as a result, there is no LSP configuration present on the PCC.

In its current version, Northstar is really impressive and only thing lacking at the moment in its in-ability to create P2MP LSPs which is must for broadcast applications in NG-MVPN environment and Juniper has plans to include this in their coming releases by end of 2017.

I am sure Service providers will surely think of using Northstar in their IP/MPLS Network where they are using Traffic Engineering LSPs in order to give them more flexibility and control over there traffic bandwidth demands.

Let me know your views on it and would you be interested to deploy this onto your network 🙂

R

Mohit Mittal

 

 

 

 

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NFV vs SDN

Cisco, Juniper, Networking, NFV, SDN, , , , ,

As we are faced with more n more SDN and NFV terms in Telecom Networking these days, i thought of discussing same here and give you my understanding of what i think of these technologies.

Currently Communication service providers (CSPs) like BT, ATnT are facing numerous challenges from OTT (Over the Top) players like Netflix, Youtube, Hulu etc. CSP doesn’t get any revenues while subscribers like us use these OTT services. Still however, the infrastructure needed to handle all this growing data traffic needs to grow more to meet the expanding capacity and customer requirements. As a result, infrastructure costs are growing faster than customer/subscriber revenue growth.

Network functions Virtualization (NFV) offers a new way to design, deploy and manage networking services. NFV decouples the network functions, such as network address translation (NAT), firewall, domain name service (DNS), caching, etc., from proprietary hardware appliances, so they can run in software. (Think of GNS3 software if you have used it on your laptop). NFV is just much more that. You must have heard that Cisco or Juniper or any vendor’s hardware are some hundred thousand pounds. You can’t use Juniper Line card in Alcatel or Cisco or vice versa. This is a challenge for Service Providers. Previously Cisco or any Hardware vendor for that matter used to sell their products based upon traffic capacity they can handle like Gig, 10G per seconds however now the Dell, HP servers can meet those requirements without you having to buy the proprietary hardware from vendors like Cisco. All you need to do is take any server and run custom software on top of it which can acts as Firewall, DNS etc. etc.  NFV utilizes standard IT virtualization technologies that run on high-volume service, switch and storage hardware to virtualize network functions.

This will surely put a dent in hardware vendors profit but if they have to keep up with client expectations they have to take this turn. Offcourse there are limitations because of using server instead of dedicated vendor router but then Service providers are not going to replace their Core MPLS routers with NFV. NFV is still new to market and is in very nascent stage to understand its various usecases.

traditional-nfv

PIC Courtesy : http://www.moorinsightsstrategy.com

SDN (Software-Defined Networking) on the other hand is a concept related to NFV, but they refer to different domains. If you are aware of how any router works, you will be able to understand it very quickly. Every Router has 3 different planes. One is Management Plan, 2nd Control Plane and 3rd Forwarding Plane. Using Management Plane Router delivers Management Functions like SSH, TACACs etc. Control Plane is where all routing protocols is processed Like OSPF, BGP, RIP, etc etc. Forwarding Plane is using which Router sends/receive the Actual traffic out/in from its interfaces.

Now work of SDN is to separate out this Control Plane from Router or any network component and provide the centralized place to control the whole Network Topology. In this way the areas like Internal Data Centres of organizations where nothing much changes happens in Control Plane you can separate out this functionality from servers/network components and use servers purely for forwarding traffic as fast as possible. There are number of tools which helps in providing this functionality and with time I think we would be able to get more on that.

However SDN as a concept is not just using Openflow switches using open flow protocol.. Other vendors are implementing it as an Automatic provisioning tool using totally different concepts but still calling it as SDN as that what it is, you are using software to influence networks.

As you can see above, NFV and SDN are somewhat different concepts and can operate independently however they are generally implemented together and can act as powerful tool in today’s network environments.

That’s all for this blog. I will discuss more on these topics in later blogs. Do let me know your comments or feedback and what you think of these technologies!

 

Regards

Mohit Mittal