Data Center Challenges: Building Networks for Agility

The key to cost efficiency in data centers is agility—the infrastructure must support allocating resources to services according to their need, and dynamically changing the allocation quickly when needs change. Today, the highest barriers to achieving this agility are limitations imposed by the network, such as bandwidth bottlenecks, subnet layout, and VLAN restrictions. In this talk I'll provide some examples of these barriers and their impact on the services. I'll then present VL2, a practical network architecture that scales to support huge data centers with 100,000 servers while providing uniform high capacity between servers, performance isolation between services, and Ethernet layer-2 semantics, and show how it has helped make data centers run more efficiently.