Implementation And Development Of Data Center Network Architecture For The Eu Lightness Project

Implementation and Development of Data Center Network Architecture for the Eu Lightness Project

Internet-based business and consumer applications are driving serious increment in traffic to datacenters. Current multi-tier and over provision data center network architectures with significant cost, complexity, and power consumption are unable to provide adequate throughput and performance according to the increasing traffic growth and Information Technology (IT) demands. The features of recently proposed data center network architectures such as dynamic routing, flexible bandwidth, SDN integration, low latency, high bandwidth, fast allocation, failure recovery, and virtualization are analyzed to associate with recognizing current limitations of data centers. In response to these identified limitations, implementing optical technologies in data center networks brings high performance activities to cope with the unprecedented demands of cloud computing and emerging web applications in the near future. LIGHTNESS (Low latency and high throughput dynamic network infrastructures for high performance datacenter interconnects) is a European Union (EU)-funded project which introduces a new hybrid optical data center network architecture capable of providing high bandwidth capacity, low end-to-end latency to meet the requirements of new and emerging distributed applications and services. LIGHTNESS data center network includes all-optical switching technologies (Optical Packet Switching (OPS) and Optical Circuit Switching (OCS)) and hybrid Top-of-the-Rack (ToR) switches, which are monitored and controlled by a Software Defined Networking (SDN) based control plane to be flexible for the IT functionalities and programmable for the heterogeneous network. The SDN-based control plane by programmability and flexibility can fully use the efficiency of LIGHTNESS multi-technology optical data center network, while providing on-demand, dynamic, flexible, scalable and highly available network services inside data centers. In addition to describing the LIGHTNESS data center network, this thesis also compares the features of some OPS architectures proposed by Eindhoven University of California (UCDavis), University of Patras, and by the LIGHTNESS project to make a basis for implementing the data plane. Finally, this thesis propose an hybrid datacenter network architecture where a set of racks (i.e. a cluster) are interconnected by means of OPS switches while the clusters are interconnected by means of OCS switches which also provides the Internet access. The performance of the OPS cluster part of the network is evaluated considering both unicast and multicast traffic and different scenarios. The results of the simulation show that lower lost packets can be achieved with the reduction in the number of nodes within the cluster, load, and multicast. The percentage of the ratio of dropped packets to the transmitted ones due to the conjunction would be increased with the higher amount of network load.

Optical Switching in Next Generation Data Centers

This book introduces the reader to the optical switching technology for its application to data centers. In addition, it takes a picture of the status of the technology and system architecture evolution and of the research in the area of optical switching in data center. The book is organized in four parts: the first part is focused on the system aspects of optical switching in intra-data center networking, the second part is dedicated to describing the recently demonstrated optical switching networks, the third part deals with the latest technologies developed to enable optical switching and, finally, the fourth part of the book outlines the future prospects and trends.

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