Art Fewell: For network services that still benefit from hardware, today these services are normally provided by appliances in the stovepipe model which doesnt seem sustainable for SDN. I have seen different proposals as to how hypervisor networks could gain hardware support including ideas utilizing advanced hardware on the ingress physical switch or on the NIC. Do you have any thoughts on this or if/how networking silicon will play a role in the future of hypervisor networks?
Martin Casado: I truly believe that the datacenter of the future will have two types of hardware: a) the x86 CPU b) the switching ASIC. The switching ASIC is responsible for providing switching between large numbers of ports. If you need to move packets between 2,000 southbound 10G ports without oversubscription, you need a switching ASIC. However, over time most other functions are likely to be consumed by software running on a general purpose processor.
Art Fewell: Growth in hypervisor networking could really accelerate a lot of things that would have probably taken forever in traditional networking, one that comes to mind is namespace networking with projects like Serval ... do you see any of these type of innovations that could fundamentally shift the networking stack coming anytime soon (or sooner than they would have otherwise)?
Martin Casado:I believe just having the first hop switch on x86 in the hypervisor is enough to change the industry. Not only does it provide the development cycle of software for new features, but it provides the network with richer semantics about the end state than we've ever had before.