Provisioning high-availability datacenter networks for full bandwidth communication

One critical challenge in datacenter network design is full bandwidth communication. Recent advances have enabled this communication paradigm based on the notion of Valiant load balancing (VLB). In this paper, we target full bandwidth communication among all servers, for all valid traffic patterns, and under k arbitrary link failures. We focus on two typical datacenter topologies, VL2 and fat-tree, and propose a mechanism to perform VLB on fat-tree. We develop the minimum link capacity required on both topologies, where edge and core links are handled separately. These results can help datacenter providers to provision their networks with guaranteed availability. Based on the results, we evaluate the minimum total link capacity required on each topology and characterize the capacity increase trend with k and with the total number of supported servers. These studies are important for datacenter providers to project their capital expenditures on datacenter design, upgrade, and expansion. Next, we compare the total link capacity between the two topologies. We find that given the same server scale, fat-tree requires less total capacity than does VL2 for small k. For large k, there exists a turning point at which VL2 becomes more capacity-efficient.