Enhancing availability of services using software-defined networking

Abstract

The immense growth of client requirements imposed on data centre and cloud providers results in a conflict with traditional networking concepts lacking the required agility. In order to promote flexibility, which data centre providers promise to their clients, this discrepancy needs to be resolved, for instance by employing the novel concept of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). This paper utilises this concept in order to minimise service downtime while performing live virtual machine migration. The work is aimed at small/medium-sized data centres and hence the findings are based on real communication patterns found in such environments. Results show that packet loss is slightly diminished while available throughput is increased thanks to the proactive approach taken during network topology changes when compared to the traditional approach based on L2 forwarding.