PortLand will work with existing hardware and routing protocols, according to the researchers, which include graduate students who worked with Vahdat.

"Our goal is to allow data center operators to manage their network as a single fabric," according to Vahdat, who maintains a blog called . "We are working toward a network that administrators can think of as one massive 100,000-port switch seamlessly serving over one million virtual endpoints."

Key to this is the development of system for servers to find one another without broadcasting their requests across an entire network. Under PortLand, switches use what are called Pseudo MAC addresses and a directory service to locate servers they need to connect, including new virtual servers. The researchers say this setup can eliminate much of the manual labor required to build a Layer 3 network.

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