Multi-tenant network acceleration scheme for OpenStack

Cloud visualization and multi-tenant networking provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider a new and innovative way to offer the on-demand services to their customers, such as the easy provisioning of new applications and the better resource efficiency and scalability. However, existing data-intensive applications require more powerful processor and computing power, as well as a high bandwidth, low latency and consistent networking service. In order to boost the performance of computing and networking services, as well as reduce the overhead of the software virtualization, we propose a new data center network design based on OpenStack, which is a promising cloud operating system solution. Specifically, we map the OpenStack networking services to the hardware switch, and perform hardware-accelerated L2 switch and L3 routing to solve the software limitations, as well as achieve the software-like scalability and flexibility. We designed our prototype system via the Arista Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) switch, and evaluated the performance improvement in terms of the bandwidth and delay using various tools. Our experimental results demonstrate that our datacenter networking solution achieves higher bandwidth, lower latency, and lower CPU utilization of the host server.