Scalable Management of Enterprise and Data Center Networks

May 3, 2011
Minlan Yu | Princeton University

The networks in campuses, companies, and data centers are growing larger and becoming more complicated to manage. Today, network operators devote tremendous time and effort to various management tasks such as customized routing, access control, and troubleshooting.
Rather than trying to make today’s brittle networks easier to manage, we focus on new network designs that are inherently easier to manage and scale to many hosts, switches, and applications. We design and develop systems that scale routing, access control, and performance diagnosis, through a combination of new data structures and algorithms that make effective use of limited memory in switches and end-host based monitoring to reduce the overhead at switches. Our systems can be easily implemented with small modifications in today’s switches and end hosts, as demonstrated by our prototypes built using the OpenFlow switches and Microsoft Windows servers, and our evaluation using data from AT&T networks and a deployment in a production data center.

Speaker Details

Minlan Yu is a rising 5th year Ph.D. student working with Jennifer Rexford in the computer science department at Princeton University. She received her B.A. in computer science and mathematics from Peking University in 2006 and her M.A. in computer science from Princeton University in 2008. Her research interest is in network virtualization, enterprise and data center networks.