Communications of the ACM
Research Project Aims to Simplify Large-Scale Network Control
Credit: AT&T
Researchers at Google, Nicira Networks, and NEC presented a research project designed to simplify the control and management of large-scale network implementations at the recent USENIX Symposium. "In recent years, as new control requirements have arisen such as increased security and the migration of lots of virtual machines, the inadequacies of our current network control mechanisms have become especially problematic," the researchers write. They created a distributed management system called Onix to address some of these issues. The system runs on the Onix Network Information Base, which contains all the elements of a particular networked environment.
"In order to scale to very large networks and to provide the requisite resilience for production deployments, an Onix instance is also responsible for disseminating network state to other instances within the cluster," according to the researchers. They also developed a network management application to enforce network security policies.
The Onix system includes a distributed virtual switch that provides a logical switch abstraction over which policies are declared over the logical switch ports.
From Network World
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Abstracts Copyright © 2010 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA 
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