Project Split Data Plane
This page is for support of Dell Split Data Plane (SDP) Project. This project is sponsored by Dell Research Office. SDP was conceptualized by Rajesh Narayanan of Dell CTO/Research Office.
What is SDP?
Split Data Plane is a means to separate coarse flows from granular flows. What we discovered was that ACLs, where most of the granular flow-definitions were done, are mainly for the purpose of advanced actions/functionality. In addition, the merchant silicon pipelines do not support such advanced actions. SDP allows us to maximize the benefits of a merchant silicon pipeline in combination with an advanced and deep flow programmable processor. This enables us to dynamically introduce new actions/functions in the packet processing pipeline while increasing the number of flow-entries. The other objective was to ensure that the development of these new functions is independent of the switch operating system to encourage third-party developers.
What are the objectives of this program?
This program’s primary objective is to generate a large number of applications that can leverage the SDN paradigm. The notion of SDN is not only the controller but also about data-plane programmability. By allowing the Stats-plane to be an equal citizen in the architecture, we hope this will rejuvenate application development for SDN.
Contributing new Applications to the Dell SDP Repository
Developers of the Dell SDP software are encouraged to contribute their applications to the project repository. The procedure for contributing new applications is as follows:
- Users are encouraged to fork the original Dell SDP repository and contribute their newly developed applications to the forked repository
- Once the users are ready to contribute their application, they need to commit the finalized code to the forked repository
- Contact the Dell SDP support team by emailing supportdellsdp@xflowresearch.com. The Dell SDP support team will review the source code and contact the original authors for any improvements/modifications
- Once finalized, the contributed application will be added to the private Dell SDP repository by the support team with the consent of the original author
The Dell SDP software can be accessed on the Github private repository. Please note that this repository is not available to general public. In order to get access to the Dell SDP software, a user needs to follow these steps:
- Register yourself on the Github website by visiting http://github.com/
- Send a request to access the Dell SDP software by emailing your Github username to supportdellsdp@xflowresearch.com
- The Dell SDP support team will reply back after receiving the request to access the Dell SDP software. The team will provide the link to private Github repository from where users can download the Dell SDP source code with the help of username provided to the Dell SDP support team