A High Performance, Low-Cost Network Architecture for Data Centers

Abstract

The goal of data center networking is to interconnect a large number of servers with low equipment cost, high performance and balanced network capacity, and robustness to link and server failures. In this paper, we present a new network interconnection structure for data centers, which leverages largely low-cost commodity Ethernet switches to support the full aggregate bandwidth of the network. Our approach requires no modifications to the end host network interface, operating system and exhibits graceful performance degradation as the switch failure rate increases. This property is of special importance for data center network. Experiments in our test bed demonstrate that our approach is fault tolerant and load balancing and it significantly accelerates representative bandwidth-intensive applications.