The Last Frontier: Our Journey Into the World of Software Defined Networking

Server virtualization, the abstracting of server software away from the physical machine has become the de facto standard for most organizations.  Storage virtualization,  the abstraction of logical storage services and... [ view full abstract ]

Server virtualization, the abstracting of server software away from the physical machine has become the de facto standard for most organizations.  Storage virtualization,  the abstraction of logical storage services and capabilities from the underlying physical storage systems, is less prevalent but has been making inroads in data centres over the past few years.  But network virtualization aka Software Defined Networking (SDN), separating the networks control logic from the underlying routers and switches, is the last data centre arena to undergo this paradigm shift of virtualization.

This presentation will describe Simon Fraser University's journey from a traditional networking based data centre with a multi-tiered architecture into that of a data centre based on software defined networking for advanced server virtualization or private cloud deployment.

We will describe the technology we used for our implementation, the design process we went through resulting in our final design, the implementation path and challenges faced turning the design into reality, and lessons learned along the odyssey.