Hyper-BCube: A Scalable Data Center Network

Mega data centers are being built around the world to provide various cloud computing services. As a result, data center networking has recently been a hot research topic in both academia and industry. A fundamental challenge in this research is the design of the data center network that interconnects the massive number of servers, and provides efficient and fault-tolerant routing service to upper-layer applications. In response to this challenge, the research community have begun exploring novel interconnect topologies including Fat-Tree, DCell, and BCube and etc. Understandably, this research is still in its infancy. The proposed solutions either scale too fast (i.e., double exponentially) or too slow, suffer from performance bottlenecks, or can be quite costly in both routing and construction. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective and gracefully scalable data center interconnect termed Hyper-BCube that combines the advantages of both DCell and BCube architectures while avoiding their limitations. We then propose fault-tolerant and routing mechanisms for Hyper-BCube. Finally, we propose a comprehensive benchmarking environment that can be used for accurately and practically evaluating and testing the proposed data center architecture.