Revisiting the design of mega data centers: considering heterogeneity among containers

In this paper, we revisit the design of mega data centers, which are usually built by a number of modularized containers. Due to technical innovation and vendor diversity, heterogeneity widely exists among data-center containers in practice. To embrace this issue, we propose uFix, which is a scalable, flexible, and modularized network architecture to interconnect heterogeneous data-center containers. The intercontainer connection rule in uFix is designed in such a way that it can flexibly scale to a huge number of servers with stable server/switch hardware settings. uFix allows modularized and fault-tolerant routing by completely decoupling intercontainer routing from intracontainer routing. We implement a software-based uFix prototype on a Linux platform. Both simulation and prototype-based experiment show that uFix enjoys high network capacity, gracefully handles server/switch failures, and causes lightweight CPU overhead onto data-center servers.