Pica8 Powers French TOUIX SDN-Driven Internet Exchange

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- White box networking specialists Pica8 today announced that 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. Software defined networking (SDN) is aimed at giving network operators a fundamentally new way to operate, provision and manage the network. With Pica8’s software, TOUIX avoids network outages and congestion caused by broadcast storms, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and uptime. TOUIX is the first Internet Exchange Provider in Europe to fully leverage OpenFlow.

“The Internet exchange environment is a great beachhead for OpenFlow / SDN technology,” said Paul Parker-Johnson, senior analyst with ACG Research. “These providers essentially interlink adjacent providers in a hub and spoke fashion, creating a convenient means for multiple network providers to interconnect their networks. Exchange networks are typically only switched and therefore are prone to broadcast storms. OpenFlow creates a very controlled means to program point to point connections and thereby eliminates any chance of broadcast storms whatsoever.”

“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.”

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.

Pica8 Inc.