DCube: A family of network structures for containerized data centers using dual-port servers

Abstract

A fundamental goal of datacenter networking is to efficiently interconnect a large number of servers in a cost-effective way. Inspired by the commodity servers in today’s data centers that come with dual-port, we consider how to design low-cost, robust, and symmetrical network structures for containerized data centers with dual-port servers and low-end switches. In this paper, we propose a family of such network structure called a DCube, including H-DCube and M-DCube. The DCube consists of one or multiple interconnected sub-networks, each of which is a compound graph made by interconnecting a certain number of basic building blocks by means of a hypercube-like graph. More precisely, the H-DCube and M-DCube utilize the hypercube and 1-möbius cube, respectively, while the M-DCube achieves a considerably higher aggregate bottleneck throughput compared to H-DCube. Mathematical analysis and simulation results show that the DCube exhibits graceful performance degradation as the failure rate of server or switch increases. Moreover, the DCube significantly reduces the required wires and switches compared to the BCube and fat-tree. In addition, the DCube achieves a higher speedup than the BCube does for the one-to-several traffic patterns. The proposed methodologies in this paper can be applied to the compound graph of the basic building block and other hypercube-like graphs, such as Twisted cube, Flip MCube, and fastcube.