Building mega data center from heterogeneous containers

Abstract

Data center containers are regarded as the basic units to build mega data centers. In practice, heterogeneity exists among data center containers, because of technical innovation and vendor diversity. In this paper, we propose uFix, a scalable, flexible and modularized network architecture to interconnect heterogeneous data center containers. The inter-container connection rule in uFix is designed in such a way that it can flexibly scale to a huge number of servers with stable server/switch hardware settings. uFix allows modularized and fault-tolerant routing by completely decoupling inter-container routing from intra-container routing. We implement a software-based uFix stack on the Linux platform. Simulation and experiment results show that uFix enjoys high network capacity, gracefully handles server/switch failures, and brings light-weight CPU overhead onto data center servers.