Autonomic Fail-over for a Software-Defined Container Computer Network

The ITRI container computer is a modular computer designed to be a building block for constructing cloudscale data centers. Rather than using a traditional enterprise data center network architecture, which is typically based on a combination of Layer 2 switches and Layer 3 routers, the ITRI container computer’s internal interconnection fabric, called Peregrine, is a software-defined network specially architected to meet the scalability, fast fail-over and multi-tenancy requirements of these data centers. Peregrine uses as the underlying physical interconnect a mesh of commodity off-the-shelf Ethernet switches, and adopts a centralized network control architecture that operates these Ethernet switches as a coordinated distributed data plane. Compared with vanilla enterprise networks, Peregrine features a fast fail-over capability not only for network switch/link failures, but also for failures of its own control servers. This paper describes the design and implementation of Peregrine’s fault tolerance mechanisms, and shows their effectiveness using empirical performance measurements taken from a fully working Peregrine prototype under various failure scenarios.