An intelligent and integrated architecture for data centers with distributed photonic switching

A novel architecture dealing with the coupling between cloud orchestration and network control is here proposed. TRIIIAD — TRIple-Layered Intelligent and Integrated Architecture for Data Centers consists of three horizontal layers and a vertical control, management and orchestration plane. The top layer offers the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). The middle layer provides a lightweight routing/forwarding mechanism. The bottom layer works as a distributed photonic switching plane. Finally, the vertical plane is responsible for coordinating the interoperation of those three layers and keeping them agnostic to each other. The vertical plane brings a new concept for server-centric designs: an Augmented Software-Defined Networking, in which a SDN controller can integrate network control with orchestration, so that consistency between decisions taken at network and virtualization layers can be ensured.