Fabriscale

The goals of the Fabriscale project are now being pursued by the Fabriscale Technologies company.

Operators of data centres and supercomputers use a special kind of software, called a fabric manager, to ensure network reliability and stable operation. Without a fabric manager, every network device would have to be configured manually and a single fault or change in the configuration would disconnect the network. This would make the computing resources unreliable and unsuitable for running critical applications.

Today’s fabric managers try to address these problems, but they are slow in addressing network faults and poor at balancing network traffic to changing workloads. They also impose strict rules on how the physical architecture of the network should be configured. This project will verify a new type of fabric manager, which will dramatically improve fabric management capabilities compared to existing solutions. It addresses several problems of  fabric management related to fault tolerance, load balancing and routing.

The technical goal is to build and launch a commercial quality fabric manager with novel features for fault tolerance, load balancing, and routing. The commercial goals are to recruit one to three pilot customers that can test the product in a production environment, then to find the first paying customers for the product. Finally, a company will be established and the business case will be prepared for further investments.