Flexplane : a programmable data plane for resource management in datacenters

Abstract

Network resource management schemes can significantly improve the performance of datacenter applications. However, it is difficult to experiment with and evaluate these schemes today because they require modifications to hardware routers. To address this we introduce Flexplane, a programmable network data plane for datacenters. Flexplane enables users to express their schemes in a high-level language (C++) and then run real datacenter applications over them at hardware rates. We demonstrate that Flexplane can accurately reproduce the behavior of schemes already supported in hardware (e.g. RED, DCTCP) and can be used to experiment with new schemes not yet supported in hardware, such as HULL. We also show that Flexplane is scalable and has the potential to support large networks.