Data Center Networks: The Rip van Winkle Edition

If Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep around 2006 and woken up 10 years later, he'd find the world a strange brew of the new and the old. He'd be amazed that phones had grown a brain, dismayed that a most excellent rendition of the Dark Knight had wandered back to the wasteland as most Dark Knight capers do. People had warmed upto electric cars, but not to climate change. And, if Ol' Rip were a network operations guy at some of the large webscale companies, he might think he'd died and woken up in heaven. Networks were no longer slow as molasses: to deploy, manage and upgrade. He'd find some things had stayed the same (IPv4 still ruled the roost), and some others not so much. He would be puzzled by the terminology and the discussions as he wandered the hallways. SDN, Open networking, Openflow, microservices, Ansible, Puppet, Kubernetes, and so on.

This tutorial is an attempt to bring folks up to speed on whats happened with networking in the past 10 years or so, especially in the data center, concluding with some thoughts on why exciting times lie ahead. The talk will be roughly divided into the following sections:

1. Who Moved My Network ? What's causing all this turmoil in networking
2. Solutions: Requirements, Terminology, Pros and Cons
3. Changing Landscape: Network Topologies
4. Changing Foundation: Network Protocols
5. Changing Operations: Modern Operations
6. Changing Residents: Modern applications and their implications on networks
7. Reading Tea Leaves

The tutorial will include demos and hands on work with some modern tools.

The audience is expected to be aware of basic networking (bridging, routing, broadcast, multicast etc.).

The key takeways from this talk will be:

• An understanding of the forces behind the changes in data center networking
• The morphology an physiology of modern DC networks
• What these changes presage of the future

Some preliminary ideas for hands on work:

• Build multi-host container network
• Build and configure a nxm CLOS topology with BGP
• Design a CLOS for x number of servers given certain box specifications

Dinesh G. Dutt has been in the networking industry for the past 15 years, most of it at Cisco Systems. Before joining Cumulus, he was a Fellow at Cisco Systems. He has been involved in enterprise and data center networking technologies, including the design of many of the ASICs that powered Cisco's mega-switches such as Cat6K and the Nexus family of switches. He also has experience in storage networking from his days at Andiamo Systems and in the design of FCoE. He is a co-author of TRILL and VxLAN, and has filed for over 40 patents.