RCube: A Power Efficient and Highly Available Network for Data Centers

Designing a cost-effective network for data centers that can deliver sufficient bandwidth and provide high availability has drawn tremendous attentions recently. In this paper, we propose a novel server-centric network structure called RCube, which is energy efficient and can deploy a redundancy scheme to improve the availability of data centers. Moreover, RCube shares many good properties with BCube, a well known server-centric network structure, yet its network size can be adjusted more conveniently. We also present a routing algorithm to find paths in RCube and an algorithm to build multiple parallel paths between any pair of source and destination servers. In addition, we theoretically analyze the power efficiency of the network and availability of RCube under server failure. Our comprehensive simulations demonstrate that RCube provides higher availability and flexibility to make trade-off among many factors, such as power consumption and aggregate throughput, than BCube, while delivering similar performance to BCube in many critical metrics, such as average path length, path distribution and graceful degradation, which makes RCube a very promising empirical structure for an enterprise data center network product.