OpenStack Network Acceleration Scheme for Datacenter Intelligent Applications

Cloud virtualization and multi-tenant networking provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers a new and innovative way to offer on-demand services to their customers, such as easy provisioning of new applications and better resource efficiency and scalability. However, existing data-intensive intelligent applications require more powerful processors, higher bandwidth and lower-latency networking service. In order to boost the performance of computing and networking services, as well as reduce the overhead of software virtualization, we propose a new data center network design based on OpenStack. Specifically, we map the OpenStack networking services to the hardware switch and utilize hardware-accelerated L2 switch and L3 routing to solve the software limitations, as well as achieve software-like scalability and flexibility. We design our prototype system via the Arista Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) switch and provide an automatic script which abstracts the service layer that decouples OpenStack from the physical network infrastructure, thereby providing vendor-independence. We have evaluated the performance improvement in terms of bandwidth, delay, and system resource utilization using various tools and under various Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints. Our solution demonstrates improved cloud scaling and network efficiency via only one touch point to control all vendors' devices in the data center.