Despite the requirement of domain isolation, it is desirable to allow server farm administration to be centralized. This paper describes GulfStream, a scalable distributed software system designed to address the problem of managing the network topology in a multi-domain server
farm. In particular, it addresses the following core problems: topology discovery and verifcation, and failure detection. Unlike most topology discovery and failure detection systems which focus on the nodes in a cluster, GulfStream logically organizes the network adapters of the server farm into groups. Each group contains those adapters that can directly exchange messages. GulfStream dynamically establishes a hierarchy for reporting network topology and availability of network adapters. We describe a prototype implementation of GulfStream on a 55 node heterogeneous server farm interconnected using switched fast Ethernet.
By: Sameh A. Fakhouri, German Goldszmidt, Indranil Gupta (Cornell Univ.), Michael Kalantar, John A. Pershing
Published in: RC21954 in 2001
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