Didn't attend in person, did listen and watch most of the broadcast material. The quality of the broadcast received was noticably better than for previous Nanogs.

Moore's Law and Networking
Andy Bechtolscheim did the first morning keynote - he's good at presenting a lot of reasonably sophisticated technical material without obviously promoting Arista. If slides are posted, they will be on the agenda page.

Moore's Law will continue to hold through 2024 at least, and probably through 2031. It will soon be possible to buy flash memory chips with 1 terrabyte of capacity. Networking speeds have not kept up with either the increasing density of memory nor the increasing capability of CPUs. The bottleneck is in the offchip communications - throughput per device has increased about 10 times in 12 years.

Manufacturers have been using ASIC workflow for networking chip development - now there's sufficient demand for 10G ethernet components to justify custom design flows, laid out with a specific clock target. Expect reasonable pricing and volumes of 40GE components in 4 years, and 100GE in 8 years.

The other issue holding back mass adoption of 10GE has been the cost of the external optical connections to the fiber used for connecting top of rack switches to the aggregating routers. (Connections from servers to the ToR as short enough for copper). The original IEEE standards didn't support an inexpensive standard for the 100m - 300m distance. Silicon photonics on parallel single mode fiber is changing that - 12 duplex channels in 4.5mm, MTP/MPO multifiber connectors - expect parts commercially available in 2014.

For the 'best' performance, have to decide if the goal is minimising latency, or minimsing packet drops, and consider the details of the TCP stack(s) in use or available. Switching paths through single chips using SRAM minimise latency; chips using less expensive off chip DRAM can have much bigger buffers.

Microsoft datacenter design
Using BGP as an IGP allows for much wider scale out, more reliable operation, than using L2 MLAG. They have some requests for vendor support for specific BGP features :
AS_PATH Multipath Relax
Allow AS In
Fast eBGP Fall-over
Remove Private AS

Building a sustainable broadband network in the city of San Francisco
Tim Pozar described some of the politics and technology involved in having a non-profit build network using City fiber with City oversight. It's still work in progress and they'd like more help.

Software defined WAN at Google
As one of the lightning talks, Ed Crabbe, who talked about Google's use of Openflow at the last Nanog, presented a short form of the talk Urs Hoelzle gave at ONS. They use their own hardware routers, run a minimal embedded OS on them, including BGP and ISIS from Quagga. There is a global broker/scheduler, non standard transport protocols, demand is tailored to be deterministic.

The ITU
There was a lighting talk, then a full presentation, about the possible consequences of the ITU deliberation due to take place in December 2012. The Internet as it currently operates has many cross border collaborations in place. Proposals from country governments for much more UN regulation are likely to interfere.

Content Delivery Networks
Most of the contributions from this panel were worthwhile listening to. Comcast has a proposal for a new address family for BGP in a single AS, since content caches perform better if they know something about the network they are in. Dave Tempkin from Netflix described the CDN they are making available.

ROVER
The talk on BGP route origin verification using reverse DNS had the most people passionate about it - it could have done with a lot more time for questions and discussion.

Energy Science 100G network
Substantial network with 100G wide area network links across the US. Good diagrams of the network, and explaining 100GBase-LR4 . Advanced Networking Initiative, ANI. They built deliberate routing loops for testing.

Lighting talks
Notable in the last batch of talks were:
Jim Martin from ISC describing progress to date on BIND 10. the first try was "a miserable failure"; it's been tested some more since and is back in production on AS112. Will be ready for user testing in October 2012.
Patrick Gilmore from Akamai with statistics from Akamai's monitoring showing recent (an hour ago) and the gradual build up of IPv6 traffic on World IPv6 Day.

9 Aug 2012 Editing to add - video was posted on the agenda some weeks back - look for the .wmv files.
Heavy Reading are selling a write up on photonic integration - there's a useful list of system and component vendors available without paying for the full report.

Meeting agenda with links to presentations - at some point video of the talks will get added http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog55/agenda.php
Moore's Law http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/moores-law-te...
Ed Crabbe's talk at Nanog 54 http://www.cunningsystems.com/2012/02/openflow-and-software-defined-netw...
Netflix open source http://netflix.github.com/
Netflix CDN http://www.zdnet.com/blog/datacenter/netflix-delivers-using-commodity-ha...
Heavy Reading Photonic integration report summary http://www.heavyreading.com/details.asp?sku_id=2883&skuitem_itemid=1433

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