Data Centre Optimisation Enhanced by Software Defined Networking
27 June 2014
Cloud computing infrastructures are being challenged by an increasing demand for evolved cloud services characterised by tight interactivity levels and different performance requirements of data-intensive and highly dynamic workloads. The classical way to deal with this demand is to horizontally scale computing and network resources in the basic block of the cloud infrastructure: the data centre. However, merely scaling out the number of servers, virtual machines (VMs) and network switches is not sufficient if these resources are not efficiently coupled with integrated management techniques that include advanced routing and switching in a multi-path environment mixed with a high flexibility to support dynamic adaptation and live-migration of VMs. In this paper, we propose a management strategy to jointly optimise computing and networking resources in cloud infrastructures. In particular, we show how Software Defined Networking (SDN) can play a key role to simplify and support efficient placement and routing of virtualized applications in a multi-tenant environment.
