SDN, not just for big greenfield networks

As Openminds is a rather small company, but one that focusses on thinking out of the box and offering our clients the best possible (Linux based) solution to host their web-applications, we are always innovating and trying new stuff. We’ve long used keepalived/lvs and friends to provide active-passive HA solutions, but they all suck. The networking nerd in me made me realise all these solutions are wrong, for various reasons.

When building a “new” datacenter from scratch, there are lots of nice SDN gear you can buy (or build). It’s easy, when there is no legacy to work with.

In this talk, I’ll show you how can implement SDN-like-techniques in a legacy environment to do HA, failover, Active-Passive and Active-Active.

Frank Louwers cofounded Openminds, a managed hosting company during his study-years. Thirteen years later, he still heads the company, and is responsible for networking, webservers, performance and all the boring managerial stuff that comes with being “the boss”. Openminds is a Gold Sponsor of this event, but this talk is in no way a sales pitch or marketing talk.