Abstract

Management tasks in most of the datacentre's is usually done over the same network
that is serving production traffic. Hence, when there is a network outage in the data
centre, along with production impact, servers and other network devices cannot be
reached remotely and hence, physical presence in the datacentre is required. In this
document, we shall propose an alternate theory to this problem. We can create an
inexpensive management network among servers within the DC to handle
management workloads using the existing power cabling. This needs to be noted
that this network will not be serving production workloads.

I. INTRODUCTION
Electric wires have always had the capacity to carry multiple signals with them apart
from electricity. This method was exploited by many ISP's and Telecom providers
across the globe to provide ADSL services which was a combination of Broadband
(Internet) and Telephone (Landline) services using power cables.

Fig. A

The above figure is of a commercially available Internet Phone splitter that used to
be setup in an individual's house where an electric cable carrying multiple
superimposed electric waves would connect to one end of the splitter and the other
end would be connected to a Landline telephone and a WiFi router/modem. This
technology of sending multiple signals over a electric cable is called Power-line
networking and we are proposing this solution to setup a management network in a
data centre. A management network will NOT be used to serve production traffic but
will be used to do miscellaneous tasks within the Datacentre viz. backups and
restoration, IPMI (iDRAC for Dell Servers, iLO for HP servers), OS installation, VM
migrations, system monitoring etc.

Any random given datacentre would contain contain more than a dozen of network
devices like routers and switches and quite a few servers. A typical network for a DC
should have the following qualities:

1. Availability: The DC network ought to be constantly available at all times despite

faults and failures.

2. Scalability: The DC network should be able to scale up and down at any given
point as the size of the DC may increase over time. Furthermore, all devices should
have access to it.

3. Deployability: The deployment needs to happen with ease and should be

compatible with the existing infrastructure. [1]
Power-line Communication (PLC) permits communication of devices over a logical
network connected by electric cables. To setup this network we shall be using
commercially available PLC modems which unlike the switch use OFDM protocol for
layer 1 and the CSMA/CA protocol for layer 2 networking. [4] Using this technique,
scalability would not be an issue as the electric cabling would be present in the Data
center and so would the cost relatively low as no changes need to be done to the
existing Data centre