Scalable Label Assignment in Data Center Networks
0Modern data centers can consist of hundreds of thousands of servers and millions of virtualized end hosts. A key challenge in providing scalable communication in the data center is assigning identifiers, or labels, to network elements and servers so that they can efficiently communicate and perform cooperative tasks. The scale and complexity of a data center makes the labeling problem unique in this environment and solutions often resort to manual configuration that is costly, time-consuming, and error prone. In this talk, I will present ALIAS, a distributed protocol for topology discovery and label assignment in data center networks. ALIAS automates the assignment of topologically meaningful addresses to the nodes in a data center, enabling scalable communication while significantly reducing the management burden of manual configuration at scale.