Summary: Ethane: Taking Control of the Enterprise
Martìn Casado, Michael J. Freedman,
Justin Pettit, Jianying Luo,
and Nick McKeown
Stanford University
Scott Shenker
U.C. Berkeley and ICSI
ABSTRACT
This paper presents Ethane, a new network architecture for the
enterprise. Ethane allows managers to define a single network-
wide fine-grain policy, and then enforces it directly. Ethane cou-
ples extremely simple flow-based Ethernet switches with a central-
ized controller that manages the admittance and routing of flows.
While radical, this design is backwards-compatible with existing
hosts and switches.
We have implemented Ethane in both hardware and software,
supporting both wired and wireless hosts. Our operational Ethane
network has supported over 300 hosts for the past four months in
in Stanford University's network, and this deployment experience
has significantly affected Ethane's design.

Source: Akella, Aditya - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Badrinath, B. R. - Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rutgers University
McKeown, Nick - Departments of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences