Physical Deployability Matters

While many network research papers address issues of deployability, with a few exceptions, this has been limited to protocol compatibility or switch-resource constraints, such as flow table sizes. We argue that good network designs must also consider the costs and complexities of deploying the design within the constraints of the physical environment in a datacenter: physical deployability. Traditional metrics of network "goodness" do not account for these costs and constraints, which might explain why some otherwise attractive designs have not been deployed in real-world datacenters.