Bursting Data between Data Centers: Case for Transport SDN

Public and Private Enterprise clouds are changing the nature of WAN data center interconnects. Data center WAN interconnects today are pre-allocated, static optical trunks of high capacity. These optical pipes carry aggregated packet traffic originating from within the data centers while routing decisions are made by devices at the data center edges. In this paper, we propose a software-defined networking enabled optical transport architecture (Transport SDN) that meshes seamlessly with the deployment of SDN within the Data Centers. The proposed programmable architecture abstracts a core transport node into a programmable virtual switch that leverages the OpenFlow protocol for control. A demonstration use-case of an OpenFlow-enabled optical virtual switch managing a small optical transport network for a big-data application is described. With appropriate extensions to OpenFlow, we discuss how the programmability and flexibility SDN brings to packet-optical data center interconnect will be substantial in solving some of the complex multi-vendor, multi-layer, multi-domain issues that hybrid cloud providers face.