Management Tool for the “Nephele” Data Center Communication Agent

Abstract

Optical switching provided the means for the development of Data Centers with high throughput interconnection networks. A significant contribution to the advanced optical Data Centers designs is the Nephele architecture that employs optical data planes, optical Points of Delivery (PoD) switches and Top of Rack (ToR) switches equipped with 10 Gbps connections to the PoDs and the servers. Nephele follows the Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm based on the OpenFlow protocol and it employs an Agent communicating the protocol commands to the data plane. The current paper presents a management tool for the Agent. The Agent's management tool is utilized to configure the Agent, create commands, perform step operations and monitor the results and the status. Moreover, as a testing and validation tool, it plays a significant role in the improvement of the Agent's design as well as in the upgrade of the entire data center's organization and performance.