Network Working Group Y. Cheng Internet-Draft China Unicom Intended status: Informational C. Zhou Expires: April 27, 2015 Huawei Technologies G. Karagiannis University of Twente JF. Tremblay Viagenie October 27, 2014 Use Cases for Distributed Data Center Applications in SUPA draft-cheng-supa-ddc-use-cases-01 Abstract This document provides several distributed data center (ddc) use cases and explains how an operator could use SUPA (Shared Unified Policy Automation) to provide these applications. Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on March 21, 2015. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2014 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must Cheng, et al. Expires April 27, 2015 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Use cases for DDC Applications in SUPA October 2014 include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. Challenges Faced by Data Center ISPs . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 4. SUPA Benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 5. Bandwidth Usage Optimization between DCs. . . . . . . . . . . 4 6. Server Synchronization between Datacenters . . . . . . . . . 5 7. Low Delay Link Selection between DCs . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 8. On-demand Path Creation between Datacenters . . . . . . . . . 7 9. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 10. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 11. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1. Introduction The SUPA (Shared Unified Policy Automation) work aims at providing the network management application-based policy protocol(s), mechanisms and models required by network management applications to easily, accurately, and efficiently select and use the available communication network capabilities through the use of network management policies. A Network Management Application is used by a communications service provider and/or operator to monitor, control, analyze and manage a communication network. An example of a Network Management Application is a set of actions used by an Operational Support System (OSS) entity to perform network configuration. Several SUPA use cases have been introduced in the problem statement document. This document reviews various use cases for Distributed Data Center (DDC) applications. Take a large-scale Internet Data Center (IDC) operator as an example, it provides server hosting, bandwidth, value-added services to enterprises and ISPs, and has more than 10 data centers using over one Tbps of bandwidth in a capital city. In this IDC network, traffic at each site is routed via configuring policy routes and adjusting routes prioritization to choose an outgoing link. This type of static provisioning comes with high costs and poor operability. Furthermore, the link bandwidth resources in the data centers are not efficiently utilized. Services usually do not have consistent bandwidth requirements at all times of the day, e.g. a video service provider usually requires less bandwidth during business hours and more during evenings. Some Cheng, et al. Expires April 27, 2015 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Use cases for DDC Applications in SUPA October 2014 applications have relative high QoS requirements that may change over time. For example provisioning bandwidth and QoS for all clients of an Instant Messaging (IM) app is not reasonable and not a cost- effective solution. The operator would like to be able to optimize traffic routes dynamically so as to have the ability to load balance between data centers and links, and direct customer traffic via policies (e.g., models, software programs routines) based on customer grade and QoS requirements. It will also be useful to monitor the real-time traffic flow and have a visualized report. Traffic engineering applications can provide dynamic traffic adjustment demands to the network based on link status reported by the network. SUPA will define network management application-based policy protocol(s), mechanisms and models required to map application's demands to network management policies en procedures (e.g. traffic redirection based on customer's grade and link status), which can be directly enforced by a network management system on network devices, to meet the operator's demands. This document illustrates several distributed datacenter (DDC) applications and explains how an operator could use SUPA to provide these applications. 2. Terminology The terminology used in the SUPA problem statement draft [ID.karagiannis-supa-problem-statement-00] applies also to this draft. 3. Challenges Faced by Data Center ISPs There are many challenges in traditional data centers: 1) Framework and bandwidth is mainly leased, depending on manual planning and design, which leads to low resource usage and high cost; 2)Service expansion is limited in single physical DC. Each DC resource is isolated, so service and resource can only be deployed in one single DC. On the other hand, multi-tenant service among different DCs are desirable for such communication between tenants or VMs located in different DCs; 3)VAS (Value Added Service) is provisioned via static configuration, which brings complex draining, long service TTM time and bad flexibility. This could not meet the requirements of complex use cases, e.g., too many VAS devices, big difference of service requirements. 4. SUPA Benefits To solve the above challenges for data center ISPs, SUPA could be applied in the following ways: Cheng, et al. Expires April 27, 2015 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Use cases for DDC Applications in SUPA October 2014 o SUPA provides an open network architecture: Open architecture, fast interconnection with third party cloud platform, support fast service innovation, unified architecture and unified planning; o SUPA provides overall DC resource integration: Network resource virtualization, inter-DC resource integration, vDC service provisioning, unified inter-DC service among different tenants or clients, which reduces opex; o SUPA provides automatic E2E service delivery: Network (including virtual network), computing, inter-DC management of stored resource, automatic service delivery, automatic VPN connection configurations among DCs which improves operation efficiency; o SUPA improves DDC network usage: Intelligent scheduling of DDC traffic, improving link usage efficiently. o SUPA provides VAS service on-demand provisioning automatically: Create or delete VAS nodes on-demand, based on various service requirements; ABPD indicates network forwarding policy based on the VAS routing, to achieve automatic draining and automatic configuration of VAS device policy. The following sections will illustrate four typical cases in distributed data center which could benefit from SUPA architecture. The policies transmitted from Network Management Applications to the DCs will be represented by a network configuration model described in[ID.adel-supa-configuration-model]. 5. Bandwidth Usage Optimization between DCs A large-scale data center may have more than one hundred links. The network between data centers is often leased and the applied bandwidth is very expensive. Also the communication between different tenants or clients which located on multiple data centers has the same issue. If the traditional shortest path algorithm is used to calculate a path based on static cost, then the path calculation cannot be dynamically adjusted based on real-time bandwidth usage. This will result in bandwidth waste. Figure 1 shows how to improve the bandwidth usage efficiency between data centers in case of two users located on different DCs. There are two paths from DC A to DC B, for example, A-->B (path 1) and A-- >C-->B (path 2). When the bandwidth between A and B is not sufficient, A will automatically transmit the traffic via C. The network management applications will configure a threshold T (e.g., 80%) for the path bandwidth usage ratio and send it to A. When an application request is received, A will detect the bandwidth usage of both paths. When the bandwidth usage ratio of path 1 (T1) has exceeded value T (e.g., 90%), while the bandwidth usage ratio of path Cheng, et al. Expires April 27, 2015 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Use cases for DDC Applications in SUPA October 2014 2 (T2) is much less than T (e.g., 10%), it will transmit the traffic to B via C, even though P1 is the shortest path between A and B. In this case, a VPN tunnel can be instantiated from A to B to setup the data path for the data transmission between data centers. The VPN request only specify the starting point and the termination point and the controller will make the decision which way to go based on the policy and the link state. And also it will configure the corresponding network elements and setup the VPN tunnel. In this way, the available bandwidth between A and B will be used efficiently, and risks of congestion between the datacenters will be avoided. +-------------------+ |Network Management | | | |Applications | +--------+----------+ | +----------+ Policy | | | (Threshold, T) | -> B | | / | | | T1 / +----^-----+ | / | +---v-----+ / | | |/ | | A + | T2 | |\ | +---------+ \ | \ | T2 \ +----+-----+ \ | | -> C | | | +----------+ Figure 1: Bandwidth usage optimization for DC Interconnection 6. Server Synchronization between Datacenters A Data center involves many systems and the server synchronization is specifically important for DCs. Once there is error in server synchronization, the system will not run regularly, which brings mistakes and failures. However, the server synchronization is not easy to be realized during the daytime when the Data Center servers are fully loaded services. Instead, many operators choose to make the synchronization in the evening at some regular intervals. Figure 2 shows how server synchronization between datacenters can be realized. Two servers separately in DC A and DC B are required to synchronize daily. The Network Management Applications, as defined in the SUPA architecture, are configured with several Policies, e.g., syn time (2am to 3am everyday for instance) on when to synchronize Cheng, et al. Expires April 27, 2015 [Page 5] Internet-Draft Use cases for DDC Applications in SUPA October 2014 the servers, BW (a required bandwidth to be maintained between the period), and the path information (which path between the two DCs costs lower). The Network Management Applications will send this policy information to both DC A and DC B. In this case, the controller will make the decision for the best time to start a VPN connection between the data centers and the VPN request should contain related information such as time, duration, BW, all of which are decided by the policy based on the network traffic condition. In this way, the two servers synchronize automatically everyday from 2am to 3am, which will guarantee the normal operation of the servers. +--------------------+ |Network Management | | | |Applications | | | +---------+----------+ / \ / \ / \ / Policy \ / (Syn Time,BW, \ / Path) \ | | +-----v----+ +---v------+ | | VPN tunnel | | | A +--------------+ B | | | | | +----------+ +----------+ Figure 2: Server Synchronization between DCs 7. Low Delay Link Selection between DCs Traditional routing algorithms do not consider real-time link conditions, some requirements of specific applications cannot be met timely, e.g., delay is a key requirement for the audio services (Skype for example). How to select a better link based on the delay of each link becomes important for the application. Figure 3 shows an example of link selection between datacenters according to the delay of each link. A value "d" is configured in the Network Management Applications for the specific applications, e.g., less than 100 ms. The value "d" will be sent to the ingress data center A for the A to detect the delays in both links between A and B. A will transmit the traffic via the link 1 to B if d1 is less than d and d2 is larger than d. In this case, the service quality and QoE user experience will be enhanced. Cheng, et al. Expires April 27, 2015 [Page 6] Internet-Draft Use cases for DDC Applications in SUPA October 2014 +--------------------+ |Network Management | | | |Applications | | | +--------+-----------+ | | | Policy (delay value "d") | | | d2 +----v----+ ------------ +----------+ | |/ \ | | | A |-----------------> B | | | d1 | | +---------+ +----------+ Figure 3: Low Delay Link Selection between Datacenters 8. On-demand Path Creation between Datacenters Figure 4 illustrates a problem related to bandwidth fragmentation. There are two users located on DC A and DC B, respectively. From DC A to DC B, two paths (A-->B, A-->C-->B) can be reached. From A to B, only 2Gbps bandwidth is left and 8Gbps is used, and from A to B via C, the link capacity is 2Gbps. So there is no bandwidth to transmit the traffic when there is a 4Gbps requirement from A to B, which causes that the bandwidth is not effectively used. There is no bandwidth to +----------+ transmit 4G +----------+ | | traffic | | | A +------------------+ B | | |10G link (8G used,| | +----------+ 2G left) +----------+ \ / \ / \2G 2G/ \ / \ / +----------+ | | | C | | | +----------+ Cheng, et al. Expires April 27, 2015 [Page 7] Internet-Draft Use cases for DDC Applications in SUPA October 2014 Figure 4: Bandwidth Fragmentation Problem Figure 5 provides a method to create on-demand path and bundle the path capabilities between datacenters. The bandwidth bundle capability is configured and sent to the DC A by the network management applications. When the bandwidth is not sufficient to meet the requirements for a specific application, A could bundle the bandwidth in the two links. More specifically, the on-demand path creation can be implemented via a VPN tunnel start from A to B. The network management application will tell the controller to start a VPN connection between A to B, and the controller will make the decision for the bandwidth request of the VPN service according to the policy and the current link state. In addition, the network capability, e.g., bandwidth bundle capability, is firstly negotiated between network management applications and the network element via other methods, which are out of the scope of this document. +--------------------+ |Network Management | | | |Applications | | | +---------+----------+ | |Policy (Bundle two paths) | | +-----v----+ +----------+ | | 2G VPN | | | A +--------------> B | | | | | +----------+ +----^-----+ \ / \ / \ 2G VPN / 2G VPN \ / \ / +----------+ | | | C | | | +----------+ Figure 5: On-demand Path Creation between DCs 9. Security Considerations Security is a key aspect of any protocol that allows state installation and extracting of detailed configuration states. More investigation remains to fully define the security requirements, such as authorization and authentication levels. Cheng, et al. Expires April 27, 2015 [Page 8] Internet-Draft Use cases for DDC Applications in SUPA October 2014 10. IANA Considerations Not applicable 11. Acknowledgments N/A. 12. Authors' Addresses Ying Cheng China Unicom P.R. China Email: chengying10@chinaunicom.cn Cathy Zhou Huawei Technologies Bantian, Longgang District Shenzhen 518129 P.R. China Email: cathy.zhou@huawei.com Georgios Karagiannis University of Twente Email: g.karagiannis@utwente.nl JF Tremblay Viagenie Email: jean-francois.tremblay@viagenie.ca Cheng, et al. Expires April 27, 2015 [Page 9]