PortLand: A Scalable Fault-tolerant Layer 2 Data Center Network Fabric

This paper considers the requirements for a scalable, eas-ily manageable, fault-tolerant, and efficient data center net-work fabric. Trends in multi-core processors, end-host vir-tualization, and commodities of scale are pointing to future single-site data centers with millions of virtual end points. Existing layer 2 and layer 3 network protocols face some combination of limitations in such a setting: lack of scal-ability, difficult management, inflexible communication, or limited support for virtual machine migration. To some ex-tent, these limitations may be inherent for Ethernet/IP style protocols when trying to support arbitrary topologies. We observe that data center networks are often managed as a single logical network fabric with a known baseline topol-ogy and growth model. We leverage this observation in the design and implementation of PortLand, a scalable, fault tolerant layer 2 routing and forwarding protocol for data center environments. Through our implementation and eval-uation, we show that PortLand holds promise for supporting a “plug-and-play ” large-scale, data center network