Analyzing Flow Isolation in Shared Resource Systems

The growing use of virtualization technologies in settings such as multi-tenant compute and storage clouds challenges us to both specify and enforce the isolation of clients sharing network and compute resources. In this paper we propose a novel analytical measure of performance isolation for shared resource systems serving multiple traffic flows or computing workloads. By basing our measure on well-known results from network calculus, we demonstrate how isolation metrics can be calculated for individual flows - or groups of flows - traversing both individual system elements and networks of those elements. Finally, we show how isolation-aware resource allocators in multi-tenant network testbeds and compute clouds can select network and compute resources to match a client´s resource needs while maintaining a desired quality-of-isolation.