Prism: a proxy architecture for datacenter networks

Y Hayakawa, L Eggert, M Honda, D Santry - Proceedings of the 2017 …, 2017 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on Cloud Computing, 2017dl.acm.org
In datacenters, workload throughput is often constrained by the attachment bandwidth of
proxy servers, despite the much higher aggregate bandwidth of backend servers. We
introduce a novel architecture that addresses this problem by combining programmable
network switches with a controller that together act as a network" Prism" that can
transparently redirect individual client transactions to different backend servers. Unlike
traditional proxy approaches, with Prism, transaction payload data is exchanged directly …
In datacenters, workload throughput is often constrained by the attachment bandwidth of proxy servers, despite the much higher aggregate bandwidth of backend servers. We introduce a novel architecture that addresses this problem by combining programmable network switches with a controller that together act as a network "Prism" that can transparently redirect individual client transactions to different backend servers. Unlike traditional proxy approaches, with Prism, transaction payload data is exchanged directly between clients and backend servers, which eliminates the proxy bottleneck. Because the controller only handles transactional metadata, it should scale to much higher transaction rates than traditional proxies. An experimental evaluation with a prototype implementation demonstrates correctness of operation, improved bandwidth utilization and low packet transformation overheads even in software.
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