A policy aware switching layer for Data Centers

This paper also talks about the mess of middle boxes that are used in traffic management, especially in the data centers where massive amounts of data are sorted, stored, and need to be looked up. Firewalls or load balancers etc are all connected in the network, which create a difficulty in changing policies, or managing the networks because of the complicated network structure. Several difficulties arise in the current implementation including configuration difficulties, manipulating link costs, and also to create separate VLANs. The current approach is not flexible nor scalable in the management, thus this paper introduces a new switch to connect the several components of the data center to create a more manageable and flexible architecture.

The switch architecture proposed is called a pswitch, which introduces a new layer between layer 2 and 3. This switch allows the middle boxes to be connected off the main network path, and to the switches. Inside the switches there are policy controls and rule tables which network managers can easily manipulate and change. And inside the pswitch, the traffic will be routed through the desired middle box component before it is passed onto the next hop, this allows a clean approach to the complicated network architecture and middle boxes that are used to manage the traffic in data centers.