Data-Centers have been emerged in the past few years. Organizations such Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offer different services which are served by their data-centers. In order to provide sufficient and versatile service, commercial data-centers are always researching and developing for better scaling, performance, security, virtualization, management, and topologies.
To that end, advanced data-centers are based on Software-Defined-Networks (SDN), and network functions virtualization (NFV), which offer a new way to design, deploy and manage the network and its services. SDN is a new approach that separates the network’s control and forwarding planes, and therefore provides a centralized view of the distributed network for more efficient orchestration and automation of network services. NFV focuses on optimizing the network services themselves, by decoupling the network functions from proprietary hardware appliances (e.g., firewall), so they can run in software to accelerate service innovation and provisioning.
In this talk, I will overview some of my research on data-center networks, and will mainly present EnforSDN, a new management approach that exploits SDN and NFV to decouple the policy resolution layer from the policy enforcement layer in network service appliances. EnforSDN improves the enforcement management, network utilization and communication latency, without compromising the appliance policy and the functionality of the network.
Yaniv Ben-Itzhak is a research staff member at Haifa IBM Research Lab. His research interests include data-center electrical and optical networks, Software Defined Networks (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), network virtualization, performance, and management. Dr. Yaniv Ben-Itzhak received his B.Sc (magna cum laude), M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.