Software product engineering
SDN & NFV
Building high-performance, resilient and automated networks
Building high-performance, resilient and automated networks
CodiLime has battle-proven expertise in building and integrating SDN & NFV solutions using both open-source and proprietary software for networking software and data center providers. We help build products and deploy them in the client’s production environment.
Tungsten Fabric (previously OpenContrail) is an open-source SDN Controller that provides connectivity and security for virtual, containerized or bare-metal workloads.
One of TF’s main strengths is its ability to connect both the physical and virtual worlds. In other words, to combine different workloads in one network regardless of their nature. They can be virtual machines, physical servers or containers.
The technology stack TF can connect includes:
CodiLime is one of the main contributors to Tungsten Fabric’s development—we’ve been working with Tungsten Fabric/OpenContrail since its inception in 2013.
Open vSwitch (OVS) is an open-source multilayer virtual switch, designed to enable effective programmatic network automation while supporting standard management interfaces and protocols including NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, RSPAN, CLI, LACP, and 802.1ag.
Open vSwitch can be used both as a software-based network switch running within a virtual machine hypervisor and as the control stack for dedicated switching hardware. Thanks to its flexibility, it has been used in multiple virtualization platforms, switching chipsets, and networking hardware accelerators.
OVS has also been integrated with various cloud computing software platforms and virtualization management systems, for example OpenStack.
OVS can act as a datplane within an SDN architecture. It is also one of the most popular implementations of OpenFlow, a communication protocol allowing remote access to the forwarding plane of a network switch or a router.
ONOS (Open Network Operating System) is an open-source SDN Controller developed under the umbrella of ONF (The Open Networking Foundation). It enables fine-grained control of network traffic passing through the underlying dataplane, which can consist of both hardware and virtual components.
A fully heterogeneous environment can be managed with the extensive library of protocols and adapters in the southbound layer that ONOS platform offers out-of-the-box.
At the same time, creating new apps and network services within ONOS is relatively easy thanks to the ability to consume features exposed by ONOS core subsystems (they offer a range of aggregated inventories and views of network topology and objects).
ONOS’ benefits include:
A Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is the implementation of SDN into WAN topology.
The SDN approach to networking consists in separating the control plane from the data plane. The idea is to use a centralized logical brain (control plane) to control multiple devices (dataplane) deployed across a network or its particular domain.
SD-WAN architecture, on the other hand, allows enterprises to use different uplinks (MPLS, LTE, fixed broadband etc.) across different branch offices. A centralized control plane allows administrators to configure policies that are then automatically applied to all sites. Additionally, administrators can configure more advanced algorithms to manage network traffic.
Building a custom SD-WAN solution can bring considerable business advantages: