RISC: A resilient interconnection network for scalable cluster storage systems

The explosive growth of data generated by information digitization has been identified as the key driver to escalate storage requirements. It is becoming a big challenge to design a resilient and scalable interconnection network which consolidates hundreds even thousands of storage nodes to satisfy both the bandwidth and storage capacity requirements. This paper proposes a resilient interconnection network for storage cluster systems (RISC). The RISC divides storage nodes into multiple partitions to facilitate the data access locality. Multiple spare links between any two storage nodes are employed to offer strong resilience to reduce the impact of the failures of links, switches, and storage nodes. The scalability is guaranteed by plugging in additional switches and storage nodes without reconfiguring the overall system. Another salient feature is that the RISC achieves a dynamic scalability of resilience by expanding the partition size incrementally with additional storage nodes along with associated two network interfaces that expand resilience degree and balance workload proportionally. A metric named resilience coefficient is proposed to measure the interconnection network. A mathematical model and the corresponding case study are employed to illustrate the practicability and efficiency of the RISC.