Scale-Out Networking in the Data Center

Abstract

Scale-out architectures supporting flexible, incremental scalability are common for computing and storage. However, the network remains the last bastion of the traditional scale-up approach, making it the data center's weak link. Through the UCSD Triton network architecture, the authors explore issues in managing the network as a single plug-and-play virtualizable fabric scalable to hundreds of thousands of ports and petabits per second of aggregate bandwidth.