Pica8 Inc. has announced Table Type Patterns (TTP), new functionality in its PicOS™ network operating system that overcomes limitations in OpenFlow scaling. With TTP, PicOS can scale to 2 million flows with Cavium’s XPliant switch ASIC, and to 256,000 flows with Broadcom’s StrataXGS® Tomahawk switch ASIC, enabling very large data center build-outs. Typical TCAM flow capacity in the top-of-rack installed base today is between 1,000 and 2,000 flows, and with Pica8’s TTP implementation, production networks can scale 1,000 times more.
More and more customers are deploying OpenFlow rules in conjunction with traditional Layer-2 / Layer-3 networks leveraging Pica8’s CrossFlow technology to provide greater agility and granular control of traffic engineering policies. With TTP capability, customers are able to take SDN and OpenFlow to a broader scale, and deploy it across a wide range of data center applications including hybrid cloud, disaster recovery, and network monitoring.
TTP defines how tables are set up in a switch, which an SDN controller can program via the OpenFlow switch protocol. The development of a TTP-based approach has been motivated by several factors, including: to maximize the available capacity, to better accommodate heterogeneity of existing hardware switches, to enable future innovation in hardware switches through more seamless SDN application development, and to enable granular and automated communication between application / controller developers and switch vendors.
