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...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CONEXT
• Authors: Haitao Wu, Guohan Lu, Dan Li, Chuanxiong Guo, Yongguang Zhang
• Keywords: Computer Networks, CONEXT 2009, Containers, Mega-data Centers, Server-centric Network