sNICh: efficient last hop networking in the data center

: sNICh: Efficient Last Hop Networking in the Data Center Kaushik Kumar Ram, Jayaram Mudigonda, Alan L. Cox, Scott Rixner, Partha Ranganathan, Jose Renato Santos HP Laboratories HPL-2010-154 No keywords available. Virtualization has fundamentally changed the data center network. The last hop of the network is no longer handled by a physical network switch, but rather is typically performed in software inside the server to switch among virtual machines hosted by that server. In this paper, we present the concept of a sNICh, which is a combination of a network interface card and switching accelerator for modern virtualized servers. The sNICh architecture exploits its proximity to the server by separating the network switching tasks between hardware and software efficiently. This enables the sNICh to address the resource intensiveness of software virtualization and the scalability limits of current hardware support. The sNICh utilizes a flow-based approach, in which hardware performs bas...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ANCS
• Authors: Kaushik Kumar Ram, Jayaram Mudigonda, Alan L. Cox, Scott Rixner, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Jose Renato Santos
• Keywords: ANCS 2010, Architectures, Computer Networks, Data Center, Software