TOUIX, one of France’s leading Internet exchanges, is leveraging Pica8’s network operating system and white box switches to program and optimize its exchange fabric. TouIX is providing an interconnected network infrastructure in 4 PoPs around Toulouse city and is interconnected with the Paris FranceIX and LyonIX IXPs.
Pica8 said its software enables TOUIX to avoid network outages and congestion caused by broadcast storms. The deployment is leveraging Ryu, the NTT Labs open-source controller, with parallel development underway for ON.Labs’ ONOS controller. Additionally, for this installation, developers used Pica8’s REST API as a means to communicate with a Graphical User Interface (GUI), simplifying common operational tasks.
“With traditional MAC-based switches, exchanges have restrictions on how to easily scale and avoid broadcast storms,” said Marc Bruyere, researcher at LAAS CNRS. “By default, an OpenFlow driven network does not do anything until you tell it. Traditional switches are routers that use lower-performance CPUs compared to servers, which is good enough to scale routed BGP networks, but not high performance enough to handle all of the MAC lookups. By controlling end-to-end paths using OpenFlow, we know the destination explicitly.”
“Low-cost, top-of-rack switches are ideal for our needs,” Bruyere added, “as the OpenFlow environment is more programmable circuit by circuit, and lack of a broadcast domain reduces what providers call broadcast ARP overhead. TOUIX’s OpenFlow design provides the optimal Ethernet fabric for IXP members to do BGP peering in a secure and stable manner. SDN OpenFlow is a fantastic opportunity to develop innovative services like a metropolitan neutral marketplace interconnecting all of the datacenters and IT services for the city of Toulouse.”
