Datacenter network architectures must change to accommodate the unprecedented scaling and low cost requirements of cloud computing environments. This paper describes our work on managing the performance of multi-path Ethernet fabrics spanning a large datacenter. Our approach is to develop an Ensemble Routing Controller, which achieves management scalability by reasoning about traffic at the granularity of a tractable set of flow ensembles, i.e. groups of flows. To support research on novel datacenter network architectures and management frameworks, the Palo Alto Open Cirrus site has been augmented with an experimental multi-path Ethernet network, which operates separately and in parallel with the production Open Cirrus network fabric. We implemented and deployed a prototype Ensemble Routing Controller to manage traffic in this multi-path network. We present preliminary experimental results showing that our controller effectively manages the fabric resources by dynamically assigning traffic to efficient network paths delivering close to optimal network goodput to applications. We also describe our experiences using the Open Cirrus platform and suggest features for Open Cirrus resource allocation that would further facilitate our research on datacenter networking.
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