Nox (platform)

Last updated

NOX is a piece of the software-defined networking (SDN) ecosystem. Specifically, it's a platform for building network control applications.

The first SDN technology to get real name recognition was OpenFlow, and NOX was initially developed at Nicira Networks side by side with OpenFlow — NOX was the first OpenFlow controller. Nicira donated NOX to the research community in 2008, and since then, it has been the basis for many and various research projects in the early exploration of the SDN space.

To a developer, NOX:

  1. Topology discovery
  2. Learning switch
  3. Network-wide switch

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Juniper Networks</span> American multinational technology company

Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including routers, switches, network management software, network security products, and software-defined networking technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Argus – Audit Record Generation and Utilization System</span>

Argus – the Audit Record Generation and Utilization System is the first implementation of network flow monitoring, and is an ongoing open source network flow monitor project. Started by Carter Bullard in 1984 at Georgia Tech, and developed for cyber security at Carnegie Mellon University in the early 1990s, Argus has been an important contributor to Internet cyber security technology over its 30 years..

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Malaysian Electronic Payment System</span>

The Malaysian Electronic Payment System (MEPS) is an interbank network service provider in Malaysia. In August 2017, MEPS merged with Malaysian Electronic Clearing Corporation Sdn Bhd (MyClear) to form Payments Network Malaysia Sdn Bhd (PayNet).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick McKeown</span>

Nicholas (Nick) William McKeown FREng, is the SVP/GM of the Network and Edge Group at Intel and a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at Stanford University. He has also started technology companies in Silicon Valley.

OpenFlow is a communications protocol that gives access to the forwarding plane of a network switch or router over the network.

Frenetic is a domain-specific language for programming software-defined networks (SDNs). This domain-specific programming language allows network operators, rather than manually configuring each connected network device, to program the network as a whole. Frenetic is designed to solve major OpenFlow/NOX programming problems. In particular, Frenetic introduces a set of purely functional abstractions that enable modular program development, defines high-level, programmer-centric packet-processing operators, and eliminates many of the difficulties of the two-tier programming model by introducing a see-every-packet programming paradigm. Hence Frenetic is a functional reactive programming language operating at a packet level of abstraction.

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a non-profit operator-led consortium. It uses an open source business model aimed at promoting networking through software-defined networking (SDN) and standardizing the OpenFlow protocol and related technologies. The standards-setting and SDN-promotion group was formed out of recognition that cloud computing will blur the distinctions between computers and networks. The initiative was meant to speed innovation through simple software changes in telecommunications networks, wireless networks, data centers and other networking areas.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and its predecessor entities have a long history of developing and selling networking products. Today it offers campus and small business networking products through its wholly owned company Aruba Networks which was acquired in 2015. Prior to this, HP Networking was the entity within HP offering networking products.

Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is an approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration in order to improve network performance and monitoring, making it more like cloud computing than traditional network management. SDN is meant to address the static architecture of traditional networks. SDN attempts to centralize network intelligence in one network component by disassociating the forwarding process of network packets from the routing process. The control plane consists of one or more controllers, which are considered the brain of the SDN network where the whole intelligence is incorporated. However, centralization has its own drawbacks when it comes to security, scalability and elasticity and this is the main issue of SDN.

Nicira is a company focused on software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization. Nicira created their own proprietary versions of the OpenFlow, Open vSwitch, and OpenStack networking projects.

Network functions virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept that leverages the IT virtualization technologies to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may connect, or chain together, to create and deliver communication services.

A network virtualization platform decouples the hardware plane from the software plane such that the host hardware plane can be administratively programmed to assign its resources to the software plane. This allows for the virtualization of CPU, memory, disk and most importantly network IO. Upon such virtualization of hardware resources, the platform can accommodate multiple virtual network applications such as firewalls, routers, Web filters, and intrusion prevention systems, all functioning much like standalone hardware appliances, but contained within a single hardware appliance. The key benefit to such technology is doing all of this while maintaining the network performance typically seen with that of standalone network appliances as well as enabling the ability to administratively or dynamically program resources at will.

Cumulus Networks was a computer software company headquartered in Mountain View, California, USA. The company designed and sold a Linux operating system for industry standard network switches, along with management software, for large datacenter, cloud computing, and enterprise environments.

Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) is a tunneling and virtualization technology for computer networks, created and backed by IBM. DOVE allows creation of network virtualization layers for deploying, controlling, and managing multiple independent and isolated network applications over a shared physical network infrastructure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open vSwitch</span> Virtual network switch

Open vSwitch, sometimes abbreviated as OVS, is an open-source implementation of a distributed virtual multilayer switch. The main purpose of Open vSwitch is to provide a switching stack for hardware virtualization environments, while supporting multiple protocols and standards used in computer networks.

Pica8, Inc. is a computer networking company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. Pica8 is a vendor of open-standards-based operating systems on white box network switches delivering software-defined networking (SDN) solutions for datacenter and cloud computing environments and traditional L2/L3 solutions for large enterprise customers. The company's products include a Linux-based L2/L3 and OpenFlow-supporting network operating system, PicOS, which is shipped as standalone software that can be loaded onto a range of 1/10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet switches based on commoditized switches purchased from original design manufacturers (ODMs).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ONOS</span>

The ONOS project is an open source community hosted by The Linux Foundation. The goal of the project is to create a software-defined networking (SDN) operating system for communications service providers that is designed for scalability, high performance and high availability.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce Davie</span> Australian computer scientist

Bruce Davie is a noted Australian computer scientist known for his work in the networking field. He has co-authored several textbooks, including Computer Networks: A Systems Approach. Dr. Davie received his B.E. (Elec) from the University of Melbourne in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1988.

Adara Networks is an American software company.