MDCube: a high performance network structure for modular data center interconnection
Shipping container based data centers have been introduced as building blocks for constructing mega data centers. However, it is a challenge on how to interconnect those containers together with reasonable cost and cabling complexity, due to the fact that a mega data center can have hundreds or even thousands of containers and the aggregate bandwidth among containers can easily reach tera bit per second. As a new inner container server centric network architecture, BCube [9] interconnects thousands of servers inside a container and provides high bandwidth support for typical traffic patterns. It naturally serves as a building block for mega data center. In this paper, we propose MDCube, a high performance interconnection structure to scale BCube based containers to mega data centers. MDCube uses the high speed uplink interfaces of the commodity switches in BCube containers to build the inter container structure, reducing the cabling complexity greatly. MDCube puts its inter and inner container routing intelligences solely into servers to handle load balance and fault tolerance, thus directly leverages commodity instead of high end switches to scale. Through analysis, we prove that MDCube has low diameter and high capacity. Both simulations and experiments in our testbed demonstrate the fault tolerance and high network capacity of MDCube.
CoNEXT '09