Data Center Networks: Address Scheming, Traffic Distribution, and Load Balancing

Abstract

Data center networks are a critical part in building a powerful data center, while tasks may start at any container and VMs may move around in physical machines as well. Not mentioning network traffic should be balanced while using network resources such as switches as efficient as possible. This paper summarizes two papers that talks about the data center networks. The first section summarizes a paper that describes efficient protocols in data centers, PortLand[1], where VMs could move to new physical machines without breaking TCP connection and achieve fast plug-and-play for new machine. The second section summarizes a survey paper which studies one of Facebook's data centers that provides web services. It mainly focuses on network traffic stability on server hosts and the traffic patterns on switches with different responsibilities.