Th4G.6.pdf OFC 2015 © OSA 2015 Virtual Machine Migration over Optical Circuit Switching Network in a Converged Inter/Intra Data Center Architecture Payman Samadi, Junjie Xu, Keren Bergman Lightwave Research Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 [ps2805@, jx2236@, bergman@ee.]columbia.edu Abstract: We present a novel converged inter/intra data center architecture using optical-circuit-switching over metro-scale distances. A Software Defined Network (SDN) control-plane provides connectivity between the application and data-plane layers. Virtual- machine migration over 50km is experimentally demonstrated. OCIS codes: (060.4254) Networks, Circuit-switched, (200.4650) Optical Interconnects. 1. Introduction The rapid growth in cloud-based services and video streaming is changing the traffic size and pattern in the optical transport networks. According to the studies, by 2017, the metro traffic increases by 560% and 75% of the overall traffic will be terminated within the metro network [1]. Regional data centers are the significant contributors to this traffic. Companies employ mid-size data centers in the metro distances that actively communicate for the services such as virtual machine (VM) migration, backup, video streaming, load balancing or fault/disaster recovery. This growth and shift in the metro traffic characteristics necessitates flexible designs with fast reconfiguration and seamless communication within network layers. Looking at intra data center networks, optics have been used as transmission links for data rates higher than 10 Gbps and distances longer than 10 m. Researchers have proposed hybrid data center architectures to offload larger traffic flows from the over-subscribed Ethernet network to an optical circuit switching network [2,3]. Optical space switches (OSS) are used as the switching substrate of the optical network to aggregate the Top-of-Rack (ToR) switches. Fur- thermore, software defined networking (SDN) is an emerging technology in the data centers. SDN enables intelligent network management using overall network state and information from the application layer. In this work, we present a novel converged inter/intra data center architecture in metro-scale distances using com- modity optical optical space switches. We employ OSS to route both east-west and north-south traffic by aggregating racks inside the data center and also providing uplink for inter data center connectivity. The network management in the metro region is through a unified SDN control plane. A 3-layered architecture is designed to receive and sched- ule service requests from the application layer, and configure optical nodes in the physical layer. We experimentally demonstrate live migration of VMs among 3 data centers over 50 km. This design provides seamless connectivity between the application and physical layers and faster network reconfiguration in metro regions. Metro Network Uni-ied Control Plane Network Controller Network Services • Migration Requests Control Plane Layer Application Layer Data Plane Layer DC 1 OSS DC 2 OSS DC N OSS … DC 3 DC 2 DC 4 DC 5 Video Streaming Bulk Transfer Fault Recovery VM Migration Rack 1 SDN Control Plane Data Center 1 OSS Ethernet … … Fiber Optic Ethernet (Copper) Internet OSS: Optical Space Switch ToR: Top‐of‐Rack Switch … Scheduler Rack 2 Rack 3 Rack 4 Rack N DC N 80 km Fig. 1: Converged inter/intra data center architecture in metro-scale distances.