Nanog53 was in Philadelphia last week.

Interesting presentations

Dave Ward (now Juniper) did the first day keynote on Software Defined Networks. The proposition is that it should be possible to give a greatly improved experience to users if it was easier for applications and the network to exchange information. Protocols: ALTO, BGP-TE, PCE, Openflow, Services Registry. Randy Bush observed in the Q&A that this kind of thing has been tried before, several times, and that security and privacy conflict with it.

Greg Hankins (Brocade) reviewed current router architecture requirements. Line rate 100 GbE is one packet every 6.72 nanoseconds. The only memory technology that supports this is embedded on custom ASICs - transfer rates to SRAM or DRAM chips are too slow. 3D packaging might help, but it generates heat in even more density than the existing 2D components. There's a useful table showing what can fit on an ASIC at each process geometry up to 32 nm (slide 14).

Peter Hoose (Facebook) gave a lightning talk about troubleshooting - it hasn't changed all that much in the last 20 years, although networks have evolved hugely - he doesn't have solutions, but there's an opportunity here.

Rob Sherwood gave the Tuesday keynote about the OpenFlow abstraction - there are at least 75 public implementations, a standards body, and demonstrated interoperability. Use cases in presention - a virtualized control plane; a VM moved from Stanford to Japan without changing its IP address; rerouting of flows between WiFi and Wi-Max; graphing live power and latency variation in a data center.

Todd Underwood (Google) was hugely entertaining in his lighting talk about reliable use of probabilistic IPv4 prefixes as a mitigation for the runout of IPv4 addresses. Great acronyms !

Geoff Huston was pessimistic about the liklihood of a coherent single Internet persisting as the IPv6 transition happens at different rates in different geographies.

Matthew Petach (who wasn't at the meeting either) took great verbatim notes from the live video stream. If this event is like previous Nanogs, eventually the video will be posted on the agenda page against each agenda item. Meantime pdfs of the slides for each presenter can be found there.

References
http://kestrel3.netflight.com/2011.10.10-nanog53-morning-session.txt
http://kestrel3.netflight.com/2011.10.10-nanog53-afternoon-session.txt
http://kestrel3.netflight.com/2011.10.11-nanog53-morning-session.txt
http://kestrel3.netflight.com/2011.10.11-nanog53-afternoon-session.txt
http://kestrel3.netflight.com/2011.10.12-nanog53-morning-session.txt

Agenda http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog53/agenda.html