FiConn_ToN.pdfVIP

This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination. IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING 1 Scalable and Cost-Effective Interconnection of Data-Center Servers Using Dual Server Ports Dan Li, Member, IEEE, Chuanxiong Guo, Haitao Wu, Member, IEEE, Kun Tan, Member, IEEE, Yongguang Zhang, Songwu Lu, and Jianping Wu, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract—The goal of data-center networking is to interconnect a large number of server machines with low equipment cost while providing high network capacity and high bisection width. It is well understood that the current practice where servers are connected by a tree hierarchy of network switches cannot meet these requirements. In this paper, we explore a new server-in- terconnection structure. We observe that the commodity server machines used in today’s data centers usually come with two built-in Ethernet ports, one for network connection and the other left for backup purposes. We believe that if both ports are actively used in network connections, we can build a scalable, cost-effective interconnection structure without either the expensive higher-level large switches or any additional hardware on servers. We design such a networking structure called FiConn. Although the server node degree is only 2 in this structure, we have proven that FiConn is highly scalable to encompass hundreds of thousands of servers with low diameter and high bisection width. We have developed a low-overhead traffic-aware routing mechanism to improve effective link utilization based on dynamic traffic state. We have also proposed how to incrementally deploy FiConn. Index Terms— Computer networks, computers and information processing, Internet. I. INTRODUCTION D ATA-CENTER networking designs both the networkstructure and associated protocols to interconnect thou- sands of [8] or even hundreds of thousands of servers [1]–[3] at a data center, with low equipment cost, hi