How To Build a 100,000-Port Ethernet Switch

BobB-nw writes "University of California at San Diego researchers Tuesday are presenting a paper (PDF) describing software that they say could make data center networks massively scalable. The researchers say their PortLand software will enable Layer 2 data center network fabrics scalable to 100,000 ports and beyond; they have a prototype running at the school's Department of Computer Science and Engineering's Jacobs School of Engineering. 'With PortLand, we came up with a set of algorithms and protocols that combine the best of layer 2 and layer 3 network fabrics,' said Amin Vahdat, a computer science professor at UC San Diego. 'Today, the largest data centers contain over 100,000 servers. Ideally, we would like to have the flexibility to run any application on any server while minimizing the amount of required network configuration and state... We are working toward a network that administrators can think of as one massive 100,000-port switch seamlessly serving over one million virtual endpoints.'"

Comments

You still need isolation

[Anonymous Coward]

I've long been of the opinion that putting more than a few hundred hosts on a single layer 2 network is almost always a bad idea.

What do you do about broadcast storms? How do you prevent some clown from anywhere in that 100,000 machine cloud from poaching another machine's IP address (either maliciously or by an accidental typo)?

Subnets and routers were invented for a reason. Just because you can bridge the whole world together into one massive virtual Ethernet segment doesn't mean you should.

You mean

[countertrolling]

I can't just go out and buy 33,334 d-links and turn off DHCP on all but one of them?