DCube: A Family of Network Topologies for Containerized Data Centers

Abstract

There are two distinct trends in building large-scale data centers. The first trend is to interconnect massive servers directly through a scalable network topology, and the second trend is to build a large-scale data center by interconnecting a large number of data center modules. Within each data center module, thousands of servers are interconnected through a certain network topology, and are packed into a container, which serves as a basic building block. This chapter introduces a family of intra-module network topologies designed for modular data centers called DCube, including H-DCube and M-DCube. Each DCube interconnects a large number of dual-port servers and low-end switches. A large number of DCube modules can be further interconnected to form a new modular data center. The evaluation results show that the DCube exhibits a graceful performance degradation as the server or switch failure rate increases. Moreover, the DCube significantly reduces the required wires and switches compared to the BCube and fat-tree. The methodologies proposed in this chapter can apply to the compound graph of the basic building block and other hypercube-like graphs, such as Twisted cube, Flip MCube, and fastcube.