Towards an Open Data Center with an Interoperable Network Volume 5: WAN and Ultra Low Latency Applications Last update: May 2012

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1 Towards an Open Data Center with an Interoperable Network Volume 5: WAN and Ultra Low Latency Applications Last update: May 2012 It is common for the volume of WAN traffic to increase at an annual rate of thirty percent of more, and this traffic volume is expected to increase even further with the advent of larger cloud data centers and multi-site enterprise disaster recovery solutions. In the past data centers didn't extend broadcast domains over long distance. Filtering was required for traffic intended to go outside a given broadcast domain. In a more modern environment, there may be tens to hundreds or even thousands of virtual servers on a single domain; if this is extended over distance, it would require a huge amount of WAN bandwidth (otherwise, it might take a very long time to move a VM and its associated data). Higher data rates on the WAN and service provider network would also drive disproportionately higher data rates on switches within the data center and at the WAN edge, which does not lend itself to cost effective scaling. This has motivated the development of new WAN technologies as the data center network has evolved. Multi-site connectivity can be implemented in a number of ways. Public Internet connections with IPSec secure tunneling are readily available and low cost, but do not provide the quality of service and performance guarantees required for many larger enterprises. Managed data connectivity services provide additional layers of security and performance running over a public or private Internet connection. Leased line data services are available from service providers which include options for private management of point-to-point networks (known as private circuits or Layer 2 VPN) or full mesh connectivity (Layer 3 VPN). In areas where leased optical fiber (or dark fiber ) is available, it is often cost effective for larger enterprises to use dedicated optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) solutions. The cost of WDM is falling rapidly, and it is also available as an integrated option on large Ethernet switches. Historically, there have been four distinct generations of enterprise WAN technologies. Starting in the mid to late 1980s, it became common for enterprise IT organizations to deploy integrated TDM-based WANs to carry both voice and data traffic. In the early 1990s, IT organizations began to deploy Frame Relay-based WANs. In the mid to late 1990s, some IT organizations replaced their Frame Relay-based WANs with WANs based on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) technology. Since around the year 2000, most IT organizations have replaced their legacy WANs with MPLS based technology combined with some Internet based services. More recently, MPLS has also been used within a single data center to deliver the same benefits as when it is used on the WAN. Since the price/performance of MPLS services tends to lag behind the expected growth of WAN traffic, new technologies such as virtual private LAN services (VPLS) are being deployed. VPLS represents the combination of Ethernet and MPLS whereby an Ethernet frame is encapsulated inside of MPLS. As is typically the case with WAN services, the viability of using VPLS vs. alternative services will hinge largely on the relative cost of the services, which will vary by service provider and geographic location. When MPLS is deployed between data centers, it functions as an overlay on top of an existing leased line

2 infrastructure; this can make it difficult to create a cost effective infrastructure for smaller and medium sized enterprises. There are several types of MPLS/VPLS services, depending on whether the application is within a single data center or between data centers, and whether traffic is being managed within a single VPN or between VPNs. Core switches that support MPLS/VPLS standards enable collapsing the router and core tiers of the data center network into a flatter network with fewer layers. MPLS/VPLS enable VM migration between data centers by keeping VMs in a single layer-2 domain which spans multiple data centers. One of the challenges associated with modern WANs in general and hybrid cloud computing in particular is that hybrid clouds depend heavily on VM migration among geographically dispersed servers. This is necessary in order to ensure high availability and dynamic response to changes in user demand for services. The desire to have transparency relative to the location of the applications has a number of networking implications including the following: VLAN Extension - The VLANs within which VMs are migrated must be extended over the WAN between the private and public data centers. Secure Tunnelling - These tunnels must provide an adequate level of security for all the required data flows over the Internet. Universal Access to Central Services - All application services, such as load balancing, should be available and function transparently in this environment o Disaster recovery solutions - As data centers become larger, there is an increasing need for multi-site managed backup, recovery, and continuous availability solutions. The nature of these solutions depends on each user s tolerace for the period of time there data can be unavailable during an outage (recovery time objective), the amount of data which can afford to be lost (recovery point objective), and other factors. Technical problems remain with supporting multi-hop across FCoE switches at extended distance, so Fibre Channel will continue to be used for long distance storage backups. Many enterprise applications will continue to use ultra high availability solutions for their mission critical data (such as GDPS in a mainframe environment). Since WAN costs can be relatively high compared with inter-site networking, small and medium sized clients often cannot simply add more WAN capacity to their networks on demand. There is a tradeoff between cost containment and increased network traffic demands. Various WAN optimization and acceleration techniques can be used to get increasing performance from the existing infrastructure. WAN optimization should enable locating key servers in a centralized location by providing application performance similar to that achieved on a LAN. Application accelerators for TCP/IP and similar protocols also play an important role in performance optimization. If real time applications are deployed over an accelerated WAN, then quality of service and bandwidth optimization are desired features. There are vendor proprietary alternatives to MPLS/VPLS; there are a number of concerns with these alternatives, including requirements to configure them on core routers, security issues (particularly for alternatives which transport traffic over an untrusted IP connection rather than an

3 MPLS/VPLS tunnel), and guaranteeing lossless performance and reserved bandwidth. Further, MPLS/VPLS is a very mature protocol, with well developed traffic engineering facilities, and since MPLS/VPLS is a shared network model, in principle it offers lower cost to the end users. An MPLS backbone for site to site connectivity is compatible with a dual homed Ethernet architecture in the data center, including core switch connectivity with MLAG, TRILL, SPB and other features described previously. Routers and firewalls should be deployed in an active/active configuration and use separate WAN links, cross-connected to provide high availability. Load balancing across redundant connections is optional depending on traffic volumes and availability requirements of the application. Ultra Low Latency Applications One application which has recently received considerable interest is the design of data centers to accommodate extremely low latency applications. In some cases, the network will not be the limiting factor for low latency (for example, storage controllers may have latency many times larger than the network); in other cases, the network latency may be a significant factor. These applications may include areas such as telemedicine and other remote control systems; one of the largest applications involves real time electronic financial transactions. Sometimes known as high frequency trading (HFT), this approach is currently responsible for over 1/3 of all stock transactions and is expected to grow significantly in coming years. The overriding design consideration for HFT applications is lowering latency, which refers to the total end to end time delay within the data center network due to a combination of time of flight and processing delays within the network equipment. Financial applications are especially sensitive to latency; a difference of microseconds or less can mean millions of dollars in lost revenue. There are several published examples from retail and online merchants in which latency reduces the number of search queries and retail transactions; some of these effects can persist even after a brief increase in latency has been restored to nominal levels. High latency translates directly to lower performance because applications stall or idle when they are waiting for a response over the network. Further, new types of network traffic are particularly sensitive to latency, including virtual machine migration and storage traffic. In the case of HFT, both the magnitude and consistency of the latency (jitter, or variation in packet arrival times) are important. Low latency is critical to high performance, especially for modern applications where the ratio of communication to computation is relatively high compared to legacy applications. The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC ) is a vendor neutral benchmarking organization comprised of leading financial market firms, who write and maintain a library of test suites which represent customer-defined, simulated market trading environments. Testing with this benchmark is observed and audited by STAC and made available to their members and subscribing companies. Today there is a tradeoff between virtualization and latency, so that applications with very low latency requirements do not virtualize their applications. In the long term, this

4 may change as increased speeds of multi-core processors and better software reduce the latency overhead associated with virtualization. The internal design of data center switches can influence latency. The number of switch chip hops within a switch should be minimized; a single-chip switch offers not only lower latency than a multi-chip switch, but also provides more consistent, deterministic latency to every switch port. Single-chip solutions also offer higher reliability and lower power dissipation. Most of the latency associated with data center networks is incurred by the upper layer protocols (TCP windowing, flow control, packet retransmission and routing, store and forward, etc.). For this reason, techniques such as iwarp and RoCE can be used to minimize the network stack latency. However, a significant amount of latency is also incurred from wide are network transport. There are three major sources of latency in the wide area network (WAN); fiber latency, WAN equipment latency, and the contributions of equipment in the fiber path (signal regenerators, amplifiers, and dispersion compensators). The fiber latency is fixed at 5 microseconds per km, and will be dominated by the WAN distance rather than distances within the data center. This is particularly difficult to adjust, since fiber paths are oftern indirect and much longer than the geographic distance between two locations. For connections between major cities, existing fiber routes are not particularly direct, and new, more direct fiber builds are often not economically justified since it is much easier to reinforce existing fiber routes.

5 7 6 5 More Latency Application Presentation Session Data 4 TCP windowing Flow control Packet re-send Segments 3 Address lookup Packet forwarding Routing Packets 2 Store-Forward Line coding Switching Frames 1 Framing FEC Bits Less Latency Figure 5.1 Sources of latency in the network There are also potentially significant sources of latency in the long distance optical transport equipment. For example, optical transponders are used to convert an incoming data signal to a specific modulated optical wavelength for multiplexing purposes, or to aggregate lower data rates using time division multiplexing. The electronic time multiplexing, performance monitoring, protocol conversion, clock recovery, and forward error correction (FEC) algorithms used in this application are all sources of added latency. While this is usually negligible for typical applications, it can be significant for latency sensitive applications. Higher data rates (over 10 Gbit/second) require FEC in order to detect and correct bit errors, but this can add tens to hundreds of microseconds latency. Similarly, the convergence of optical and electrical signals in a sub-rate multiplexing architecture can be achieved using the industry standard IETF G.709, known as Optical Transport Network (OTN). This approach encapsulates user data in a digital wrapper to decouple the server links from the long haul links, and is commonly used to encapsulate lower data rate traffic into a Gbit/second backbone. However, OTN encapsulation also introduces tens of microseconds additional latency, and should be

6 disabled for ultra low latency networks. We also note that many vendor proprietary interswitch links (ISLs) on Fibre Channel switches are not fully compatible with OTN, and thus OTN should be disabled if these interconnects are used for long distance transmission. For distances exceeding km, optical amplification and dispersion compensation are required. Optical fiber amplifiers consist of specially doped sections of fiber which may be tens to hundreds of meters or more in length. Optical signals passing through this fiber are amplified without requiring electronic to optical signal conversion, so the overall latency from an optical amplifier is lower than a corresponding electronic amplifier; there is a tradeoff in signal integrity since the optical amplifier cannot retime a signal like the electronic amplifier. Although the latency introduced by a single optical amplifier is typically very low (less than a few microseconds), for fiber links with poor noise figures, many amplifiers placed close together may be required, thus increasing the aggregate latency. The type of optical amplifier will also make a difference. Erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) require longer fiber lengths within the amplifier, and thus add more latency compared with Raman amplifiers. Extended distance links also require dispersion compensation, to overcome the fixed levels of chromatic dispersion associated with long distances of installed fiber. The type of dispersion compensator can make a significant difference in latency. One approach involves inserting spools of specially treated dispersion compensating fiber into the link, which have a negative dispersion shift and cancel out the positive dispersion associated with the rest of the fiber. A typical 100 km link can be compensated with about 14 km of dispersion shifted fiber, which adds about 70 microseconds to the link latency [6]. If the dispersion compensating fiber is not optimally placed, additional optical amplifier stages may be required, which further increases the link latency. Another approach is the use of dispersion compensation gratings, which are short lengths of optical fiber fabricated with a chirped fiber Bragg grating in their core. This diffraction grating is able to induce high levels of negative dispersion proportional to the optical wavelength; several possible designs have been proposed [7]. A 100 km length of fiber can be compensated using only about 20 meters of fiber Bragg grating, with an additional latency of less than 0.15 microseconds. Although dispersion compensating grating are currently more expensive, the cost difference may be justified in cases where ultra-low latency is required. Additional latency tuning can also be achieved through tuning of the application environment, operating system, and hardware environment of the servers attached to the network, although these details are beyond the scope of this architecture. In summary, for ultra-low latency applications such as high frequency financial trading, the data center network can introduce significant amounts of latency. Within a data center, the entire network stack must be considered, including the server adapter, top of rack switches, and core switches; end to end solutions which perform well on independently audited latency benchmark tests are recommended. The number of switch chips within a network switch should be minimized. For links between data centers, latency can be optimized by selecting the shortest possible physical fiber path, disabling FEC and OTN, using Raman amps instead of EDFAs, and using dispersion compensating

7 Bragg gratings instead of dispersion compensating fiber. In the future, as transaction rates increase, we expect further reductions in latency will be possible through faster processors and network interface controllers, accelerated middleware appliances, and ultra-low latency switches, combined with a certain amount of tuning and design optimization. Technical References A Bach, High speed networking and the race to zero, Hot Interconnects (HOTI) conference, 11 Madison Ave, New York, NY, August 25-27, 2009; Best practices for tuning system latency, IBM White Paper, March 2011, 17 pp., tp_pdf.pdf Discussion on why MPLS is more secure than OTV: IETF, Request for Comments (RFC) Pages,