Proposal to ONF About Kaloom Kaloom is a networking company building an innovative data center networking fabric targeted at Large Enterprises and Operators/Telcos. Kaloom’s product, the Kaloom Flow Fabric™ provides the following features: •
Complete automation (self awareness and self provisioning) necessary to deploy a data center fabric at scale
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Capability to network slice (vFabric) the data center resources in alignment with overall Telco network slicing strategies
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Support for offloading of data plane features from Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) to allow them to match and exceed the performance of purpose-built hardware appliances while providing higher scale, greater flexibility and radically lower cost
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Connection of multiple VNFs to be connected in the most efficient way possible (Complex Service Function Chaining)
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A highly programmable merchant silicon based data plane that can be programmed in P4
The Kaloom Flow Fabric™ runs on commodity hardware using commercially available merchant silicon. It is a fully programmable, automated, software-based data center fabric capable of running virtual network functions efficiently and at scale. The solution offloads certain VNF data plane functions from compute servers and allows them to run within networking white boxes fully optimized for data plane packet processing functions, while the control plane functions continue to run on the compute servers. The Kaloom Flow Fabric™ can simultaneously support virtual machines, containers, and bare metal environments, either stand alone or together, in the same fabric with the ability to interconnect each of them without the need for external devices. Furthermore, deployment of the solution fully interoperates with existing data center networks while improving operational processes. The Kaloom Flow FabricTM initially supports two integrated VNFs - an accelerated virtual switch and a virtual router. It also natively supports load balancing of flows across the multiple paths between data center switches. These VNFs are established within the Kaloom Flow Fabric™ using P4. P4 is an open source programming language designed specifically to allow programming of packet forwarding planes, and is being adopted by the industry for next generation programmable switches. Kaloom will eventually open up the fabric allowing any 3rd party VNFs that use P4 to run its data plane within the fabric, leveraging all the performance and cost advantages of the Kaloom Flow Fabric™. Significant performance benefits can immediately be achieved by adopting Kaloom’s integrated switch and router. The flow fabric will essentially be optimized in alignment with CORD architecture, allowing it to be utilized as the network infrastructure for CORD implementations. It will provide advantages for implementations – M-CORD, E-CORD, R-CORD and A-CORD.
Kaloom Flow FabricTM Features and Benefits -
Built on open standards, utilizing white box hardware and commercial silicon.
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Fully programmable using P4 in order to provide increased flexibility and feature velocity
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Fully automated to reduce configuration time and complexity and to minimize errors.
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Natively supports both container and VM based VNFs
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Increases per-server packet throughput and significantly reduces latency.
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Reduces cost while optimizing compute density and lowering compute power requirements.
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Ensures consistent security, availability, reliability, serviceability by utilizing a standard Linux distribution on networking white boxes.
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Seamlessly supports increases in networking endpoints, density and changes in traffic flow.
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Manages multitenancy at scale with tenant-based separation and controlled, secure communication between tenants.
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Supports detailed in band telemetry in order to support network analytics
Proposal Kaloom proposes to showcase the various capabilities of its P4 enabled data center fabric software running on white box switches with the Barefoot Tofino 6.5Tbps programmable forwarding ASIC. The below list of test cases will demonstrate most of the initial capabilities of Release 1 within the Q1 2018 timeframe: •
Self-forming fabric (2 spine + 2 leaf) + auto expansion (add another 2 leaf) or (2 spine + 1 leaf, with expansion of 1 additional leaf).
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Show that fabric is running native IPv6 through visibility into process of self-forming fabric. May be through the use of the GUI to show this.
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Multiple vFabric (network slicing) configurations to align with overall network slicing strategy.
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Multiple L2 tenant networks per vFabric containing multiple VLANs/VxLANs – IPv4 and IPv6 traffic flows/streaming on each L2 VLAN/VxLAN tenant network.
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Auto healing/recovery – controller failure, leaf/spine node failure, link failures, complete power failure and restart. (Will require use of GUI to visualize topology and see alarms on node and link failures).
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Containers (Kubernetes) instance in a vFabric (CNI interworking with the Kaloom Flow Fabric™).
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SPT for compute host offload of virtual networking - latency test – SPT offload showing latency improvements.
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Fabric controller GUI – topology, provisioning/configuration, (statistics – via CLI) and logs including per vFabric views/management for Data Center Infrastructure Provider (DCIP) and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) frameworks, showing different views/stats at each level.
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Openstack instance in a vFabric.
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management, will be available to demonstrate during the Q2 2018 timeframe. Additional routing capabilities, depending on customer demands, will also be demonstrated in this timeframe as part of Release.
Summary By showcasing Kaloom’s Flow Fabric, the use of P4 in a first ever commercially viable data center fabric can be demonstrated, especially in its applicability to CORD network architecture. In addition to demonstrating its viability, the customer use cases that Kaloom is addressing can be demonstrated either as possible solutions, or as discussion points in determining solutions utilizing P4 as a basis.
