MRI: Acquisition of a Data Center Testbed for Security and Resilience Research

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project, acquiring a data center instrument, aims to conduct research on security and resilience. The goal is to design and verify a security architecture that features high scalability, good flexibility, and low complexity, and to develop and verify a systematic resilience scheme to provide differentiated resilience to various applications and optimize the failure recovery. The project also focuses on the deployment of the novel, hybrid security architecture (HSA), which decouples security from routing and enables the full distribution of the security devices in the DCN regardless of network topologies and routing schemes. This feature is expected to enable the perimeter defense model to become one in which the security checking and enforcement is much more integrated into the data center fabric. The instrument will be used to study the modeling of the interactions between the application and lower networking layers. In addition, it will be used to design the protocols and interfaces between them, to develop QoS-aware fast failure recovery algorithms, as well as improve the application layer failure reactions. The proposed instrument can greatly impact the evolution of secure data centers (in particular, multi-tenant data centers) toward higher capacity and better service provisioning. The results of the project will be disseminated via publications. The proposed software and hardware modules are expected to encourage research and commercialization. The proposed instrument should greatly impact education and student training, and is expected to also be shared with the research community also outside the institution.