A Hybrid Testbed for Performance Evaluation of Large-Scale Datacenter Networks

Datacenters (DC) as well as their network interconnects are growing in scale and complexity. They are constantly being challenged in terms of energy and resource utilization efficiency, scalability, availability, reliability and performance requirements. Therefore, these resource-intensive environments must be properly tested and analyzed in order to make timely upgrades and transformations. However, a limited number of academic institutions and Research and Development companies have access to production scale DC Network (DCN) testing facilities, and resource-limited studies can produce misleading or inaccurate results. To address this problem, we introduce an alternative solution, which forms a solid base for a more realistic and comprehensive performance evaluation of different aspects of DCNs. It is based on the System-in-the-loop (SITL) concept, where real commercial DCN equipment (switches) is interconnected with simulated DCN nodes via the SITL virtual gateway modules in the Riverbed Modeler, forming a unified hybrid real-simulated DCN setup. This testbed is complemented with high performance network testers, which can generate a mix of different real traffic streams at L2-3 and L4-7 at the rates of 1, 10 or up to 40 Gbps. These components allow performance benchmarking tests to be conducted at large scale.