Networks of Tiny Switches (NoTS): In search of network power efficiency and proportionality

The era of cloud computing is driving deployments of dense, high bandwidth, high port count network devices whose energy consumption is growing super-linearly. This trend diverges from the objective of power proportional, cloud-scale datacenter and enterprise networks, and implies a looming network power wall that will require re-thinking the design and configuration of networks and network systems. In this paper, we present a new architecture called Networks of Tiny Switches (NoTS). Our approach is based on the idea of building large networks from low port count, low power devices. We provide an overview of the hardware, software, and management required by a NoTS architecture. We also describe a case-study for NoTS in the enterprise context, and conduct a thorough evaluation of using small switches in a datacenter.