Towards a next generation data center architecture

Abstract

Applications hosted in today's data centers suffer from internal fragmentation of resources, rigidity, and bandwidth constraints imposed by the architecture of the network connecting the data center's servers. Conventional architectures statically map web services to Ethernet VLANs, each constrained in size to a few hundred servers owing to control plane overheads. The IP routers used to span traffic across VLANs and the load balancers used to spray requests within a VLAN across servers are realized via expensive customized hardware and proprietary software. Bisection bandwidth is low, severly constraining distributed computation Further, the conventional architecture concentrates traffic in a few pieces of hardware that must be frequently upgraded and replaced to keep pace with demand - an approach that directly contradicts the prevailing philosophy in the rest of the data center, which is to scale out (adding more cheap components) rather than scale up (adding more power and complexity to a small number of expensive components).