Rapid Software Image Distribution for Resource Sharing among Highly Available Session Control Server Clusters

The utility computing model enables total resource optimization by consolidating server resources and allocating them to each user on demand. To apply this model to session control server clusters composing a carrier-grade telecommunication network for optimization of resource utilization, dynamic software deployment to shared server resources must be done rapidly even when a large number of servers is simultaneously requested. Because a long-time service stoppage due to the lack of resources is unacceptable in the carrier network infrastructure, we propose a rapid software deployment system that distributes a shared software image called a golden boot image to targeted servers using a scalable pipelining single-chain data transfer method we developed. Our system tolerates variability of boot times due to heterogeneity in commercial networks by starting the image transfer in the order of booted servers while taking into account network topology to achieve wire speed. Experimental results with a prototype system showed that the deployment of a 4- GB software image to 29 servers took less than 10 seconds, 1.15 times longer than for deployment to a single server, indicating high scalability. The proposed system also showed tolerance to boot-time variability in simulations.