Technical Reports
HPL-2009-26
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Killer Fabrics for Scalable Datacenters
Schlansker, Michael; Tourrilhes, Jean; Santos, Jose Renato; Turner, Yoshio
HP Laboratories
HPL-2009-26
Keyword(s): Networks, Ethernet, datacenter, routing, multipath, fat tree, bandwidth, hash, TCA
Abstract: Large-scale datacenters are rapidly increasing in number and size to satisfy computing and storage needs for globally connected businesses and the World Wide Web. 10Gb/s Ethernet is now being adopted to meet increasing bandwidth needs for in-datacenter communications. However, most datacenter network architectures are still based on specialized hierarchical edge-core topologies which are costly to build, difficult to maintain and consume large amounts of power. This paper describes enhancements to Layer two Ethernet switches that support multipath L2 routing for scalable datacenters. This enables a cost- effective scalable network architecture based on enhanced layer two Ethernet switches. The architecture provides multipath routing for Ethernet while preserving important Ethernet features and interoperability with traditional Ethernet gear. While this work is currently limited to scalable fat tree networks, these topologies provide an attractive approach for scaling large datacenter networks.
14 Pages
Additional Publication Information: Submitted to SIGCOMM, 2009
External Posting Date: February 6, 2009 [Fulltext]. Approved for External Publication
Internal Posting Date: February 6, 2009 [Fulltext]