HSDC: A Highly Scalable Data Center Network Architecture for Greater Incremental Scalability

As the volume of data keeps growing rapidly, more and more storage devices, servers and network devices are continuously added into data centers to store, manage and analyze the data. The industry experience indicates that, instead of a huge number of servers added at a time, the data center network also expands gradually by adding a small number of servers from time to time. As a result, how to achieve an incremental scalability is becoming a very important challenge in designing modern data center network architectures in order to maintain the topological properties unchanged when the size of data centers grows. In this paper, we propose a new type of data center network architecture named HSDC (High Scalability Data Center Network Architecture) based on the hypercube network. The HSDC is constructed by using $m$m-port switches and 2-port servers. The fault-tolerant routing algorithm designed in this paper for HSDC can be executed on any vertex and is able to construct a path between any pair of vertices. In order to achieve an incremental scalability, we further propose three types of incomplete HSDC structures that allow gradually adding servers into the structures, while maintaining all the topological properties. The simulation experiments and performance results demonstrate that the throughput of HSDC is comparable to that of Fat-Tree, BCube and DCell. Furthermore, the analysis results indicate that HSDC strikes a good balance among diameter, bisection width, incremental scalability, cost and energy consumption in contrast to the state-of-the-art data center network architectures.