Collaborating with the Enemy on Network Management (Transcript of Discussion)

Abstract

This talk is about collaborating with the enemy. Last year at the Protocols Workshop we talked about software defined networks, and this is an exciting new technology which is being deployed in data centres. The idea is that you can take a router which costs a million dollars and you can split it up into a commodity PC running some control software, and a number of switching cards that are also commodities. And you can potentially make a whole lot of stuff software that up to now was custom Cisco stuff or Juniper stuff, and not very accessible. This has got traction because if you are someone like Google you could save an enormous amount of money on all the routers in your data centres. The question is whether you can do something more interesting and exciting with it, and use it in more difficult environments. Last year we talked about whether you could use software defined networks in a complex multi-tenanted environment, like Heathrow, where you have got over a hundred thousand badged staff working for three thousand different companies. How do you manage all the cross-domain trust issues involved, if you have got both El Al and Iran Air among your tenants at your airport?