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Pica8 pokes SDN traffic into labelled BGP paths

Loosing logical domains across the wide area network

Getting SDN working across the WAN is becoming the hot topic of the month: white box SDN OS provider Pica8 is the latest to take a shot at the problem.

The company has announced that it's adding support for labelled Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in the 2.6 release of its PicOS operating system.

It's hardly a new standard – RFC 3107 dates back to 2001 – which as head of product marketing Calvin Chai told Vulture South means “had time to marinate”.

So why apply it to the SDN world after 14 years? One reason is the familiarity of the protocol, because getting a brand-new protocol into a service provider network is difficult.

The other, Chai said, is that it implementation is easy: “The only dependency is MPLS. If you have that, and you have BGP, there isn't a whole lot you need to do to take advantage of this” – and use it to create overlay networks outside the walls of the data centre.

In this blog post, Chai explains that “overlays are a critical construct because they enable network operators to create more virtual subnets – which in turn support multi-tenancy, VM mobility, and service differentiation”.

While enterprises are often running with VMware's VXLAN for their virtualisation overlays, that's not attractive to the carrier, Chai explained, because of their familiarity with MPLS and BGP – and because those protocols don't tie them to a particular vendor.

The development came in response to a service provider project Pica8 undertook, Chai said. The use-case was load-sharing within the data centre, and workload mobility for end users.

The service provider wanted a logical domain sharing solution using technologies it already knew, he added.

Another requirement was scaling at the edge. While core network scalability is a well-known discipline, the customer found getting what it wanted at the edge was becoming expensive – hence the decision to head for a white-box solution.

Using VMware for the overlay, he claims, means “you need hardware with an ASIC that can support VXLAN, but labelled BGP lets you use commodity kit”.

The trial version of PicOS 2.6 is here, and the hardware compatibility list is here. ®

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