Designing Efficient Systems Services and Primitives for Next-Generation Data-Centers

Current data-centers lack in efficient support for intelligent services, such as requirements for caching documents and cooperation of caching servers, efficiently monitoring and managing the limited physical resources, load-balancing, controlling overload scenarios, that are becoming a common requirement today. On the other hand, the system area network (SAN) technology is making rapid advances during the recent years. Besides high performance, these modern interconnects are providing a range of novel features and their support in hardware (e.g., RDMA, atomic operations). In this paper, we extend our previously proposed framework comprising of three layers (communication protocol support, data-center service primitives and advanced data-center services) that work together to tackle the issues associated with existing data-centers. We present the performance results using data-center services such as cooperative caching and active resource monitoring and data-center primitives such as distributed data sharing substrate and distributed lock manager, which demonstrate significant performance benefits achievable by our framework as compared to existing data-centers in several cases.