John Pershing, Presenter
Michael Kalantar
Sameh Fakhouri
German Goldszmidt
IBM
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 verification, 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.