Killer Fabrics for Scalable Datacenters

M. Schlansker, J. Tourrilhes, Y. Turner, J. R. Santos
2010 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications  
Networks, Ethernet, datacenter, routing, multipath, fat tree, bandwidth, hash, TCA Large-scale datacenters are rapidly increasing in number and size to satisfy computing and storage needs for globally connected businesses and the World Wide Web. 10Gb/s Ethernet is now being adopted to meet increasing bandwidth needs for in-datacenter communications. However, most datacenter network architectures are still based on specialized hierarchical edge-core topologies which are costly to build,
more » ... to maintain and consume large amounts of power. This paper describes enhancements to Layer two Ethernet switches that support multipath L2 routing for scalable datacenters. This enables a cost-effective scalable network architecture based on enhanced layer two Ethernet switches. The architecture provides multipath routing for Ethernet while preserving important Ethernet features and interoperability with traditional Ethernet gear. While this work is currently limited to scalable fat tree networks, these topologies provide an attractive approach for scaling large datacenter networks. External Posting ABSTRACT Large-scale datacenters are rapidly increasing in number and size to satisfy computing and storage needs for globally connected businesses and the World Wide Web. 10Gb/s Ethernet is now being adopted to meet increasing bandwidth needs for in-datacenter communications. However, most datacenter network architectures are still based on specialized hierarchical edge-core topologies which are costly to build, difficult to maintain and consume large amounts of power. This paper describes enhancements to Layer two Ethernet switches that support multipath L2 routing for scalable datacenters. This enables a cost-effective scalable network architecture based on enhanced layer two Ethernet switches. The architecture provides multipath routing for Ethernet while preserving important Ethernet features and interoperability with traditional Ethernet gear. While this work is currently limited to scalable fat tree networks, these topologies provide an attractive approach for scaling large datacenter networks.
doi:10.1109/icc.2010.5502190 dblp:conf/icc/SchlanskerTTS10 fatcat:uficdkm4hffndjyvujhfe6dd2q