Data-Centers and Cloud Computing

Overview

Clouds are growing in importance as more and more services are being migrated into them. With the adoption of the cloud as a model of deploying services, comes new challenges in managing these services. In this work, we examine the underlying data centers within these clouds. In studying the data centers, we aim to understand the characteristics of traffic within the data center and to use our observations to develop a traffic engineering technique for alleviating loss and reducing congestion. From our study of data center traffic, we observe that traffic at the edge is ON-OFF and this ON-OFF arrival process can be parametized with a set of heavy tailed distributions. In addition to this, we observe that a significant portion of the traffic matrix is predictable at short time scales. To leverage these observations, we propose MicroTE, a traffic engineering techniques that reduces congestion by routing predictable traffic around hotspots within the network.

Papers

• MicroTE: Fine Grained Traffic Engineering for Data Centers [pdf]
  Theophilus Benson, Ashok Anand, Aditya Akella and Ming Zhang.
  CoNEXT 2011, Tokyo, Japan.
  
  
• CloudNaaS: A Cloud Networking Platform for Enterprise Applications [pdf]
  Theophilus Benson, Aditya Akella, Anees Shaikh and Sambit Sahu.
  SOCC 2011, Cascais, Portugal.
  

• Network Traffic Characteristics of Data Centers in the Wild [pdf]  
  Theo Benson, Aditya Akella and David Maltz.  
  IMC 2010, Melbourne, Australia.

• The Case for Fine-grained Traffic Engineering in Data-centers [pdf]
  Theophilus Benson, Ashok Anand, Aditya Akella and Ming Zhang.
  INM/WREN 2010, San Jose, CA.
  
  
• Peeking into the Cloud: Toward User-driven Cloud Management [one pager pdf]
  Theophilus Benson, Sambit Sahu, Aditya Akella and Anees Shaikh.
  Poster at NSDI 2010, San Jose, CA.
  
  
• Understanding Data Center Traffic Characteristics [pdf]
  Theophilus Benson, Ashok Anand, Aditya Akella and Ming Zhang.
  SIGCOMM 2009 WREN, Barcelona, Spain.
  
  

Talks

• Network Traffic Characteristics of Data Centers in the Wild, IMC 2010, Melbourne, Australia, November 2010.
• The Case for Fine-grained Traffic Engineering in Data-centers, NSDI 2009 INM/WREN, San Jose, CA, April 2010.
• Understanding Data Center Traffic Characteristics, SIGCOMM 2009 WREN, Barcelona, Spain, August 2009.

Data, Source code

• Data Center Traces: Data sets used in the IMC 2010 study on traffic in data centers.

People

Graduate students: Ashok Anand, Theophilus Benson.
Collaborators: Sambit Sahu, Anees Shaikh, Ming Zhang.