SDN for Cloud Data Centres

In this chapter, we provide a technical overview of cloud DCs and their network infrastructure evolution and discuss how SDN has emerged as a prominent technology for configuring and managing large-scale complex networks in this space. After comparing and contrasting the most common DC network topologies (such as canonical and fat tree, B-cube, DCell, etc.), we discuss the main challenges that SDN can help addressing due to, among others, the fast and flexible deployment of advanced services it can facilitate, its inherent programmability, and its suitability for supporting measurement-based resource provisioning. We subsequently describe the benefits of using SDN for DC network configuration and management and briefly outline some prominent SDN deployments over large-scale DCs. We discuss the potential of SDN to play the role of the central nervous system for the converged management of server and network resources over single-administrative DC environments and, finally, we highlight promising open issues for future research and development in this area.