A Framework for Integration of Rule-Oriented Data Management Policies with Network Policies

Traditionally data management software running on top of the Internet has very limited primitives to interact with the networking layer. This limitation has become a major road-block to develop next generation data management applications requiring high-bandwidth and dynamic network configuration. In this work, we present a policy-driven software framework that acts as an adaptation layer between the data management software and SDN networks. This framework allows a tight coupling between the data grid and the network and therefore makes complex workflow-like cross-layer computation possible. We have prototyped this adaptation layer integrated with iRODS, a popular policy-driven data grid software and Floodlight, a popular OpenFlow controller, and demonstrate how network policies become part of the overall data grid policies to improve the application performance.