SWIM: A Switch Manager for Datacenter Networks

Datacenter networks are rapidly increasing the number of servers they support, making equipment management highly complex. Network attributes are scattered among network engineering groups, making troubleshooting cumbersome. Meanwhile, network vendor diversity leads to an explosion of vendor-specific management systems or single-use automation scripts, limiting network scalability and increasing management time and effort. Switch Manager (SWIM) copes with this growth by standardizing the language for describing network attributes and unifying the interface for executing management actions on the network equipment.