Challenges and opportunities on network resource management in DCN with SDN

With the explosive growth of applications and application traffic, data centers networks are challenged in network utilization and network performance, which is crucial to guarantee the efficiency of computing and storage resources of data center servers. Recently, software defined network has been exploited to manage the network resource in a center controller, which provides opportunities to optimize the network resource utilization. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of the network resource management in data center with software defined network, and point out the opportunities.

I. Introduction

Data center network (DCN) is a infrastructure with fully clustered equipments of computer systems, storage systems, power supplies, communications, and securities, which can be rented partially or totally to personal tenants and companies for general online applications and computations. A recent report [1] from Anthesis Group infers that until 2015 there are about 33 million physical servers deployed inside data centers around the world. For the significant growth of network traffic and the increasing traffic volume, an urgent challenge of DCN is how to manage the network bandwidth efficiently (reference needed).