[Sdnp] Proposed SDN BOF charter

[Shane Amante]

Robert,

On Sep 20, 2011, at 12:32 PM, Robert Raszuk wrote:
> Shane,
> 
> I think we all have here our own perspective how SDNP may be useful. I
> see it more useful in a sort of conductor-less fashion or fully
> distribute conductor residing on each network element, but this is I
> think minor detail at this point.
> 
> However in the below email one point you made got my particular
> attention and if you could I would like to drill it a bit :)
> 
>> My gut feeling is this *probably*
>> happens in the SDNP plug-ins, because conceptually they are supposed
>> to understand the intimate details of the control SW and/or fwd'ing
>> HW that they are speaking with to make a certain fwd'ing action
>> happen on behalf of the SDNP conductor ... in fact, if/when the SDNP
>> plug-in cannot program fwd'ing state in HW (perhaps because the
>> plug-in wasn't good at aggregating HW state) it needs to return a
>> "busy signal" to the SDNP conductor which can then tell the
>> application to 'try again'.
> 
> "Busy signal" usually means no resources ... no resources can happen when we reserve resources for something else.
> 
> So question .. Do you envision one role of SDNP to reserve any network resources ?

Yes, but not necessarily on an _IP_ network.  Let's use an example that Ping provided during the BOF: Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery (BCDR) across an optical network.  Application, inside DataCenter B, needs to quickly restore gobs of data from DataCenter A to DataCenter B, (say there was complete loss of disks in DataCenter B).  The application talks to an SDNP controller, find out that the IP network between them is normally provisioned to carry at most 1 Gbps of data, which isn't fast enough.  Application says "I need 10G" to the SDNP controller.  SDNP conductor sets up 10G Wavelength between DataCenter A and DataCenter.  In addition, SDNP conductor also verifies there is capacity and then sets up VLAN's on switches inside the respective DataCenters to get to the Optical ADM to allow the two servers to talk to each other.  Data restores.  When it's all done, Wavelength is released.  That is one definition of "reserving capacity".

Let's not pigeon-hole ourselves in to thinking SDNP is strictly associated with IP/MPLS networks.  Lots of other components & layers comprise a "network" across which applications want to communicate.  

-shane



> Even asking for resources during any admission control make sense when if available we will reserve those for the duration of our conversation as well as all other conversations will do exactly the same for a given resource pool.
> 
> That is why I was insisting that network recognizes the packets rather then application start telling the network list of requested resources required for given conversation. Not that this is bad idea .. but there will be years to come between all applications speak the new language and in the mean time those which do need to still shoot in the dark.
> 
> Many thx,
> R.