SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to bring agility to the network infrastructure in data center networks. While modern data centers leverage server virtualization to quickly and easily deploy applications, and storage systems that abstract away the hard drives and enable applications to access any data from any server at any time, the network infrastructure that protects and makes the network more efficient is still largely hardware appliances. With cloud traffic expected to quadruple over the next several years (according to Cisco), a rapid growth in the number of devices (with the Internet of Things emerging), and an ever increasing complexity and scale of security threats, this project will provide data center operators with the agility to quickly and easily deploy infrastructure to keep up with these trends and threats. In doing so, society will experience more reliable networked applications with reduced data breaches. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will provide technical validation for a new approach to network function virtualization, invented at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in which network functions are disaggregated into separate processing and state storage components. Experiments in the lab have shown seamless scalability, disruptionless failure management, and processing rates in line with other software solutions. The goal of this project is to run in a production environment (a data center with real traffic) to fully quantify the throughput, latency, scalability, resilience, and cost effectiveness when faced with production conditions.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project results from the fact that it builds on the trend to make IT infrastructure consumable as a service and unlocks this potential for network functions. In deploying the Stateless Network Functions as a Service solution, cloud providers, enterprises, and internet service providers are able to launch network functions, such as firewalls and load balancers, on demand, and the Stateless platform automates the management of these functions. With cloud traffic expected to quadruple over the next several years (according to Cisco), a rapid growth in number of devices (with the Internet of Things emerging), and an ever-increasing complexity and scale of security threats, this project will provide operators with the agility to quickly and easily deploy infrastructure to keep up with these trends and threats. In doing so, society will experience more reliable networked applications with reduced data breaches. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project provides the research and development needed to realize the vision of a network function operating system. Whereas the Phase I project established technical feasibility by demonstrating the technology that decouples network functions state from processing can be turned into a product and integrated into a production environment, the Phase II project will approach three new research directions that will support a complete platform. (i) Network service chaining: While not a new concept, it is one that has proven to be challenging with virtual appliances. This project will add support to the Stateless platform to connect network functions into chains, elastically scale chains, and provide quality of service of the whole chain. (ii) Observability: This project will introduce the ability to away the details when appropriate or peel away the layers of ion as needed, providing operators with a simple solution they have full control over. (iii) Software development kit: This project will introduce both the application programming interfaces as well as the isolation mechanisms to allow third parties, whether other vendors or data center operators, to introduce new network functionality based on the Stateless platform. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.