PowerMan: An Out-of-Band Management Network for Datacenters Using Power Line Communication

Authors: 

Li Chen, Jiacheng Xia, Bairen Yi, and Kai Chen, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Abstract: 

Management tasks in datacenters are usually executed in-band with the data plane applications, making them susceptible to faults and failures in the data plane. In this paper, we introduce power line communication (PLC) to datacenters as an out-of-band management channel. We design PowerMan, a novel datacenter management network that can be readily built into existing datacenter power systems. With commercially available PLC devices, we implement a small 2-layer PowerMan prototype with 12 servers. Using this real testbed, as well as large-scale simulations, we demonstrate the potential of PowerMan as a management network in terms of performance, reliability, and cost.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {211239,
author = {Li Chen and Jiacheng Xia and Bairen Yi and Kai Chen},
title = {{PowerMan}: An {Out-of-Band} Management Network for Datacenters Using Power Line Communication},
booktitle = {15th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 18)},
year = {2018},
isbn = {978-1-939133-01-4},
address = {Renton, WA},
pages = {561--578},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi18/presentation/chen-li},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = apr
}

Presentation Video