Abstract
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a new way to operate, manage, and deploy communication networks and to overcome many long-standing problems of legacy networking. However, widespread SDN adoption has not occurred yet due to the lack of a viable incremental deployment path and the relatively immature present state of SDN-capable devices on the market. While continuously evolving software switches may alleviate the operational issues of commercial hardware-based SDN offerings, namely lagging standards-compliance, performance regressions, and poor scaling, they fail to match the cost-efficiency and port density. In this paper, we propose HARMLESS, a new SDN switch design that seamlessly adds SDN capability to legacy network gear, by emulating the OpenFlow switch OS in a separate software switch component. This way, HARMLESS enables a quick and easy leap into SDN, combining the rapid innovation and upgrade cycles of software switches with the port density and cost-efficiency of hardware-based appliances into a fully dataplane-transparent and vendor-neutral solution. HARMLESS incurs an order of magnitude smaller initial expenditure for an SDN deployment than existing turnkey vendor SDN solutions while, at the same time, yields matching, or even better, data plane performance for smaller enterprises.
Highlights
S DN offers a radical break with traditional ways of building, operating and managing networks
The results indicate that HARMLESS scales to multiple cores linearly, the HARMLESS-ESwitch mix already achieves its maximum performance with only 4 cores
CAPEX: Fig. 8a compares the CAPEX of a greenfield deployment in the CLOS-based telco data center (DC) as the function of access port density supported in ToR switches
Summary
S DN offers a radical break with traditional ways of building, operating and managing networks. Enterprises without substantial in-house expertise and select IT staff (“organizations that aren’t called Google” [2]) face significant business, economic, and technical deployment barriers, since migration to SDN requires a nontrivial amount of forward planning, an extensive investigation of vendor offerings and device options, and a fairly radical change in the mental model, producing a typical chicken and egg problem [1]–[6], [14]. Incremental deployment strategies may offer the smoothest upgrade path and the least interference with daily network operations [15], yet managing heterogeneous network architectures may prove challenging due to the nontrivial ways the legacy and SDN control planes can interact [3], [4], [6].
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