Designing efficient high performance server-centric data center network architecture

Data center network (DCN) architecture is regarded as one of the most important determinants of network performance. As the most typical representatives of DCN architecture designs, the server-centric scheme stands out due to its good performance in various aspects. In this paper, we firstly present the design, implementation and evaluation of SprintNet, a novel server-centric network architecture for data centers. SprintNet achieves high performance in network capacity, fault tolerance, and network latency. SprintNet is also a scalable, yet low-diameter network architecture where the maximum shortest distance between any pair of servers can be limited by no more than four and is independent of the number of layers. The specially designed routing schemes for SprintNet strengthen its merits. However, all of these kind of server-centric architectures still suffer from some critical shortcomings owing to the server’s responsibility of forwarding packets. With regard to these issues, in this paper, we then propose a hardware based approach, named “Forwarding Unit” to provide an effective solution to these drawbacks and improve the efficiency of server-centric architectures. Both theoretical analysis and simulations are conducted to evaluate the overall performance of SprintNet and the Forwarding Unit approach with respect to cost-effectiveness, fault-tolerance, system latency, packet loss ratio, aggregate bottleneck throughput, and average path length. The evaluation results convince the feasibility and good performance of both SprintNet and Forwarding Unit.