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ActiveNets @ Industry Lab (Nortel’s, ’98 - present)

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I can show you many devices that “turn on a dime” Anybody willing to pitch the

dime ?

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AcademiaGov’t research Industry Labs

• agenda• graduates/interns • literature • prototypes

•β’s and COTS• cool jobs • grants• technology previews

Food chains

?

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What sold AN to my Labs

Problem: Our own R&D is the bottleneck

when we go after customers’ special

needs• Velocity, scaling issues• Limited in-house depth in finance, ecommerce,

medicine, etc. …

Opportunity: Make a quantum leap in devices’ extensibility

• Lower the level of exported abstractions, for 3rd party and entrepreneurs to access, script, control

Ignition: Folks’ personal interest, circa ‘98

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A tractable AN sub-set

•Think Active Services rather than Active Networks, really

•Don’t pick interoperability fights with anyone•Activate flows rather than individual packets •Drive commercial-grade hw (ASIC, FPGA, MEM, …)•Gain appreciation for “life in a big city” type of issues•Gear up for few first-class impedance-mismatch points

•Packet to circuit

•Wireline to wireless

Data Plane

Control Plane

Management PlaneAPPSAPPSAPPSAPPS

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Shipping products

•AN has improved the breed of our L2-L7 switches•Tangible extensibility proof-point in a commercial L2-

L7 gigabit switch with [0..12] add-on x86/Linux environments for “EE” hosting, over a proprietary “NodeOS” layer

For example, EE-SSL:

• Client sends an HTTPS request

• L2-L7 Switch redirects request on port 443 to EE-SSL

• EE-SSL completes SSL handshake

• EE-SSL initiates HTTP connection to server on port 80

• Switch selects real server based on configured LB policy

• Server responds to HTTP request and replies to the EE-SSL

• EE-SSL encrypts session and sends HTTPS response to client

EE

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Which customers?

CarriersCarriers

Service Service

ProvidersProviders

EnterprisesEnterprises Active Services yield cost efficiencies and

superior networkexperience

Active Services lower TTR and increase

revenues, customer care, competitiveness

Active Services don’t belong here. Though Carriers’ agility (e.g., BoD) enables new

A.S.

Smoothest

Path

Outsourcing

Opportunities

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Which verticals?Pick ‘em based on $$$ and velocity at stake

1. The ones where Business Continuance mattersHourly

Business Downtime Costs

Brokerage operations $6,450,000Credit card sales authorizations $2,600,000Pay-Per-View TV $150,000Home shopping TV $113,000Catalog sales $90,000Airline reservations $90,000Tele-ticket sales $69,000Package shipping $28,000ATM fees $14,500

Source: Fibre Channel Industry Association

2. Movie biz• See movie post-production as mission-critical app.• 30’ of “Moulin Rouge” movie amount to 2

terabytes, with a handful of post-production houses involved

• Peeks and valleys in their IT usage, limited IT fluency

• Biz unscathed by economy blues

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An E2E example1. A code-red situation requires that data be migrated

away from an enterprise, an embassy, etc. [enterprise action]

2. The evacuation flow preamble tells the customer-provider edge box to find or create an optical circuit for 1-hr uncontested bandwidth [provider action]

3. Provider requests on-the-fly circuit setup to a carrier capable to dynamically switch lighpaths [carrier action]

This much for the packet-to-circuit impedance mismatch. Compare to 1-800 call or point-and-click provisioning

[ “EvaQ8” demo @ DARPA DANCE, May 30th ‘02]

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• Manage comm. + comp. resources in an extensible L2-L7 switching platform

•Formal understanding of efficiency, effectiveness, isolation, etc.

•For admission control and scheduling

• Raise the interoperability bar by way of standards•Ongoing work @ IETF, W3C

Data Plane

Control Plane

Management PlaneAPPSAPPSAPPS

• Digress on key service enablers such as the standard for agile optical networks and bandwidth-on-demand

•Ongoing work @ ITU

To do’s …

•Respectfully submit to the end2end Inquisition