SBIR Phase I: Stateless - Taking from the Lab to a Production Environment

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to bring agility to the network infrastructure in data center networks. While modern data centers leverage server virtualization to quickly and easily deploy applications, and storage systems that abstract away the hard drives and enable applications to access any data from any server at any time, the network infrastructure that protects and makes the network more efficient is still largely hardware appliances. With cloud traffic expected to quadruple over the next several years (according to Cisco), a rapid growth in the number of devices (with the Internet of Things emerging), and an ever increasing complexity and scale of security threats, this project will provide data center operators with the agility to quickly and easily deploy infrastructure to keep up with these trends and threats. In doing so, society will experience more reliable networked applications with reduced data breaches. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will provide technical validation for a new approach to network function virtualization, invented at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in which network functions are disaggregated into separate processing and state storage components. Experiments in the lab have shown seamless scalability, disruptionless failure management, and processing rates in line with other software solutions. The goal of this project is to run in a production environment (a data center with real traffic) to fully quantify the throughput, latency, scalability, resilience, and cost effectiveness when faced with production conditions.