1. Brocade Flow Optimizer
05/11/2015
Openlab Technical Workshop
Adam Krajewski Edoardo Martelli Stefan Stancu

2. Brocade Flow Optimizer software
An SDN application for optimal network traffic flow management
OpenDaylight controller for OpenFlow-based network control
sFlow for monitoring the network traffic
Flow management through policies
Traffic pattern match
Decision how to handle the flow (drop, redirect etc)
User friendly GUI provides interactive and real-time events logs and traffic statistics
Collaboration goal:
Enhance and generalize the Brocade Flow Optimizer architecture to meet CERN requirements
05/11/2015
IT-CS-CE - CERN openlab

3. IT-CS-CE - CERN openlab
Use case 1: Intelligent Dynamic Policy Based Routing
Open Daylight
Brocade Flow Optimizer
Internet traffic (non-physics)
accidentally arriving via “physics” network.
physics data
Two distinct external networks
Internet
LHC dedicated (physics data)
Use Brocade Flow Optimizer to ensure that:
Physics data stays on the physics network
Internet data stays on the campus network
05/11/2015
IT-CS-CE - CERN openlab

4. Use case 2: firewall offload
Use Brocade Flow Optimizer to:
Identify top talkers
The user can decide what to do with such flows:
Discard (e.g. DDoS attack)
Bypass Firewall (know trusted traffic)
Don’t touch (neutral internet traffic)
Twofold optimization
Offload firewall (expensive resource) from handling high amounts of trusted traffic
Higher bandwidth for physics research traffic
Brocade Flow Optimizer
Open Daylight
05/11/2015
IT-CS-CE - CERN openlab

5. Use case 3: IDS traffic mirroring
Use OpenFlow technology
OpenFlow gives high flexibility for specific fields to be matched for traffic flows
Use Brocade Flow Optimizer for scalable and flexible flow mirroring
distributed mirroring
traffic matching IP=***0  mirror to port 1 (IDS - 1)
traffic matching IP=***1  mirror to port 2 (IDS - 2)
don't mirror trusted traffic
traffic matching trusted IP  “forward normal”
Open Daylight
Brocade Flow Optimizer
05/11/2015
IT-CS-CE - CERN openlab

6. IT-CS-CE - CERN openlab
Current status
Current status:
Lab environment ready
ICX Campus LAN switches at CERN
MLX Series Core Routers at Brocade
Fellow integrated with the Brocade developer team
Playing an active role in the development
Some code already pushed and merged successfully
Firewall offload use case already addressed in the Brocade Flow Optimizer 1.1 release
Other use cases to be tackled in the future releases
05/11/2015
IT-CS-CE - CERN openlab