Two-phase load balancing of In-Memory Key-Value Storages through NFV and SDN

Social networks and other clouding applications should require a fast response from datacenter´s infrastructure. One of the techniques that has been widely used for achieving such requirements is the employment of In-Memory Key-Value Storage (IMKVS) as caching mechanisms in order to improve overall user experience. Memcached and Redis are applications that use IMKVS approach. Commonly IMKVS clients use Consistent Hashing to decide where to store an object, which may cause network load imbalance. Furthermore, these clients work only at the application layer, so network conditions are not considered to distribute user´s accesses. This paper proposes a new cache architecture with two phases load balancing to improve IMKVS performance, which has adopted a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) architecture to manage the load balancing mechanism. The proposal was evaluated in the Mininet emulation environment and shows an improvement on load balancing giving best user experience.