I had the opportunity to attend a OIN workshop in Berkeley, California this past month. The workshop was hosted onsite at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory so I didn’t even need to commute to attend the event.

The first day of the program was on Science DMZ architecture, security, and performance using perfSONAR presented by ESnet. Later in the day we discussed Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs) and how Globus helps to enable end-users with big data transfers. The second day focused on 100G Networking, SDN, and OpenFlow followed by hands-on and troubleshooting exercises using HP Procurve switches that supported the OpenFlow 1.0 protocol.

The type of network traffic that I have been working with over the past eight years before starting at Berkeley Lab has been mainly general-purpose business traffic for remote access, site-to-site connectivity, and Internet access. As my entry to the Big Data world is rather new, this was an excellent workshop that help to solidify the design principals of high volume data transfers. The idea of taking a stateful firewall out of the network architecture was a foreign concept to me a few months ago and enabling 10 Gigabit speeds truly requires a different mindset when it comes to design.