Network Virtualization in the Data Center

Abstract

—Modern data centers are abstracted into different pools of resources: compute, storage, and network. This enables workloads to be instantiated and run in the most efficient location. Unfortunately, the inability to treat the network infras-tructure as a pool of resources limits the other pools to be treated as such. This paper provides an overview of three techniques that enable the abstraction of network resources as a pool: separation of the control and data planes, data-centric APIs for network controllers, and virtual overlay networks. The combination of these techniques enables the migration of enterprise workloads to the hosted service providers and increases resource utilization within the data center.