Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. has developed an automatic analysis technology to improve communications performance and quality in virtual networks.
With the spread of virtualization technologies, such as the cloud, software defined networking (SDN), and network functions virtualization (NFV), there is demand for the ability to flexibly set up and operate high performance virtual infrastructure.
In order to set up and operate virtual infrastructure for operations that require high performance, it is necessary for experts with knowledge of both hardware and software to take time to analyze bottlenecks and set up the virtual infrastructure appropriately. This results in high operating costs with frequent changes to the system structure or usage situation.
To address this issue, Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a technology that, with a low load, captures communications packets passing through virtual infrastructure, as well as a technology which uses this information to identify communication bottlenecks and automatically recommend configurations to improve communications speed and to reduce packet loss and other measures to raise virtual network quality.
These technologies have been confirmed to roughly double communication speeds of virtual networks. With this technology, high communication performance and quality can be maintained, even in environments where the system structure and usage situation frequently change, such as virtual infrastructure for the cloud or telecommunications carriers.
Development Background
With the spread of virtualization technologies like the cloud and NFV, the importance of virtual network technologies for rapidly and flexibly connecting multiple systems is increasing. In current virtual networks, there are issues with degradations of communication performance and quality, particularly at high load times, so there has been a demand for technology to improve them for applications which require high communications performance and quality, such as telecommunications carriers.
Issues
In order to improve the communications performance of virtual networks, it is necessary to identify the locations and causes of bottlenecks, and then, based on those results, to eliminate the bottleneck by appropriately configuring the hardware and software. This can be done by expanding the buffer between processes that are communicating with each other in significant volumes, for example, or by changing deployment such that the processes communicating with each other are handled on processors with shorter communication routes.
In order to identify bottlenecks, it was necessary for an expert who is well versed in in the methods of configuring both hardware and software, and familiar with their characteristics, to spend time investigating the bottlenecks. In addition, as the system structure and usage situation frequently change with virtual infrastructure, it was necessary to analyze communications bottlenecks with every change and reconfigure the virtual infrastructure, resulting in higher operating costs.