Importance Measures for NFV Data Center: An Availability Evaluation

Abstract

Data center infrastructures need to provide high availability of their services. Unexpected spikes of downtime in data centers lead to financial losses. Besides, there are intangible costs such as damaged reputation, low employee satisfaction, and reduced customer retention. In this context, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) emerged as a paradigm that assists data centers in becoming more dynamic and flexible. This paper presents an availability evaluation and importance analysis under the redundancy of NFV in data centers. The NFV data center component importance is represented by using Reliability Block Diagrams (RBD). The proposed models have identified the availability importance and critical devices in an NFV data center. This research also suggests alternatives for device redundancy to reach higher availability and proposes a new importance measure for analyzing the impact of NFV factors on data center availability. The measure can evaluate the degree of the impact of a failure on the data center, therefore, help to identify the factors with a substantial impact on data center availability.

A cluster-based solution for Service Function Chain allocation in large scale infrastructure

“…proxies, network address translation, and firewalls) following the traditional approach based on proprietary closed hardware-driven implementations or dedicated middle-boxes [3] no longer responds to the requirements. A common practice among vendors involves providing their firmware or management software, which increases the operational and acquisition costs used to launch new network services [4]. Consequently, the lack of flexibility presented in traditional networks makes them difficult to implement, dynamically deploy new services and also compromises the network performance [5].…”

Service Function Chain Placement in Distributed Scenarios: A Systematic Review

“…proxies, network address translation, and firewalls) are offered as proprietary closed hardware-driven implementations or dedicated middle-boxes [84]. Each vendor provides its own management software and firmware, resulting in significant capital investment to create and launch a new service [97]. This lack of flexibility in traditional networks turns their integration and deployment of new service cumbersome while compromising network management since middle-boxes have expensive and slow provisioning cycles besides facing waste of resources in low traffic due to difficult re-purposed and must be dimensioned at peak loads [100,86].…”

“…For instance, considering a linear SFC composed of three VNFs, where each one has an availability equals to 95%, the availability of the whole SFC is 85% approximately (the multiplication of the availability of all VNFs). This can become a problem for operators as different network and link events may impact SFC availability, including network downtime, software failures, misconfigurations, and infrastructure failures [97]. This paper presents a systematic review of SFC placement in distributed scenarios, discussing the main work contributions in the last decade.…”