by Michael Cooney, NetworkWorld
Microsoft researchers are experimenting with a programmable, low-cost prototype switch they say could help support cloud or other network-delivered services.

Called ServerSwitch, the package integrates a high performance, programmable ASIC switching chip with a fully programmable multicore commodity server and control software designed to handle data center network traffic more efficiently than some other software-based control systems that are also under development,” according to Microsoft Asia’s Guohan Lu, who presented a white paper on ServerSwitch at today’s Usenix Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation. Lu and other Microsoft researchers as well as the Tsinghua University in Beijing, China are working on the ServerSwitch.

For example, the Software Defined Networking technology Openflow - which got huge industry support recently in the form of a new foundation that included Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, IBM, Cisco, Brocade, Juniper Networks and a host of others - is one technology ServerSwitch might augment in the future.

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