Title: Aruba SDN in Mobile-First Network
 
Abstract Summary:

SDN Controller is a unified control point in an OpenFlow-enabled network, simplifying management, provisioning & orchestration of the network. SDN enables delivery of a new generation of application-based network services. Through application program interfaces (APIs), network administrators are developing solutions that connect business requirements and network infrastructure innovatively. 

One of the key challenges that administrators of SDN directed Campus Networks have is co-existence of wired and wireless devices. Wireless devices are mostly OpenFlow unaware. Thus, SDN-based policy enforcements remained possible only at the wired edge. Wherever the wireless traffic was encrypted and encapsulated to the Wireless Controller, it wasn't possible to provide to the principles of SDN fully, since there were no means to visibility or programmability of such traffic. Aruba Mobility Controller AOS 8.x bridges this gap of SDN enablement. It indigenously enables visibility, security and optimization of traffic between wired and wireless boundaries! Some of the use cases that have been realized are, "DNS inspection and blocking malicious requests", "tapping traffic from a centralized place", "prioritizing Skype traffic for better collaboration", "Reducing mean time to innocence with automated diagnosis", to name a few. The overall solution is an enterprise-class platform for delivery of a broad range of network innovations in the future.

The talk focuses on a specific use case of user based traffic analytics and elucidates how hybrid SDN supports visibility without having to steal user's traffic for inspection, backed by a customized ASIC pipeline on the switch.