Bare-Metal Switches And Their Customization And Usability In A Carrier-Grade Environment
Key: NBK+17
Author: Leonhard Nobach, Jeremias Blendin, Hans-Jörg Kolbe, Georg Schyguda, David Hausheer
Date: October 2017
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: IEEE
Book title: Proc. 42st IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)
Keywords: Bare-Metal Switching, Dataplanes, Network Functions, Middleboxes, Sofware-Defined Networking, Cost-Efficiency
Abstract: The current ecosystem of network elements, such as switches and appliances, is largely dominated by devices supplied and sold with a bundled operating system, and software dedicated to manage the device's forwarding hardware, however, these platforms are not open-source and cannot be arbitrarily customized, and there is no cost transparency or flexibility in choosing software different to the bundled components. In this paper, we explore the capabilities of bare-metal switches, which are equipped with commodity switching hardware components, but shipped without an operating system. We evaluate the feasibility of these commonly lower-cost devices to meet the requirements of a customized, carrier-grade network function. Therefore, we have implemented a prototype on generic hardware, re-using as much open-source software as possible. Our Broadband Remote Access Server (BRAS) prototype can lower the cost compared to proprietary network appliances, and, known to have a hardware backplane capacity of 720 Gbps, the merchant-silicon / ASIC approach can highly outperform the state of the art of current x86-based virtualized network functions, while implementing the most important BRAS features.
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