HP Labs Reveals Work On Next-Generation Network Technology

Hewlett-Packard invited reporters and industry analysts into its HP Labs research facility on Tuesday to share work it’s doing to make IT networks faster, more scalable and more reliable, including replacing copper wire computer cables with optical interconnects. The open house at HP Labs comes as the technology giant goes after the network equipment business of industry leader Cisco Systems and as HP portrays itself as an innovator and not just a low-cost alternative to Cisco.

HP Labs researchers detailed work they are contributing to an industry standard project it calls OpenFlow networking, which aims to add a "control layer" to an IT network between the existing network management layer and the physical infrastructure of network switches, routers and other IT assets. The control layer would reprogram switches to identify certain data packets and take specific action based on that identity. An FTP packet can be treated one way, while an HTTP packet can be treated another. The control layer intelligence would be able to reconfigure switches more quickly than a technician doing a tedious command line interface (CLI) reconfiguration, basically rewriting lines of code, says Charles Clark, a distinguished technologist in HP's Networking business unit.

"In this system, what we’re able to do is more dynamically change the network through an OpenFlow interface in order to program the network," Clark says, adding that OpenFlow capability can be introduced to an existing network infrastructure. "We can deploy new functionality in the management and control plane layer that causes those devices to do something different than they did before."

HP is a member of the Open Network Foundation, a collaboration of multiple tech companies whose mission is to improve networking through software-defined solutions. Leaders of the foundation are Deutsche Telekom, Google, Facebook, Verizon, Microsoft and Yahoo. The networking industry is also represented; besides HP; Cisco, Brocade and Juniper are members.

Also at HP Labs, researchers are studying optical technology as a replacement for copper wires within networks to dramatically improve bandwidth and scalability, says Mike Tan, distinguished technologist in HP's Intelligent Infrastructure Lab.

If an IT staff wants to increase network capacity to 25 Gbps from, say, 10 Gbps, they would have to reconfigure the electrical backplane in each traditional copper wire-based switch. "It needs to be reoptimized, redesigned and then retweaked," Tan says.Optical technology eliminates the need to redesign the backplane and eliminates the need for the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) fabric layer for routing data streams among line cards within a switch.

To make that routing process quicker, the optical solution takes a different approach, he says. "What we have done is, in order to eliminate that, we're broadcasting our traffic so that each line card broadcasts to all the line cards that are attached to the backplane," he says. Each packet contains a header identifying the type of packet and how it should be routed.

HP is two to five years away from having a commercial optical product, Tan says, adding that the lab is trying to take out some of the costs from developing the optical technology.

HP entered the networking market in earnest following its acquisition of 3Com, which was completed in 2010, and it has claimed some market share gains at the expense of Cisco. Cisco has countered by saying that HP's competing largely on price, offering customers only a "good enough network" that won’t prepare customers for the growing demands being placed on enterprise networks.

But HP Labs is working on innovations that make networks not only more scalable but easier to manage, says Saar Gillai, VP of the Advanced Technology Group and CTO of HP Networking.

Referring to the complexity of the CLI process required to reconfigure a switch, Gillai says HP is innovating to make networks less complex. "It shouldn't be this hard, and part of the reason maybe it is this hard is that there hasn’t been enough competition to push the providers to provide better solutions," he says. "Well, we’re changing that."

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