- Arjun Singh
- Joon Ong
- Amit Agarwal
- Glen Anderson
- Ashby Armistead
- Roy Bannon
- Seb Boving
- Gaurav Desai
- Bob Felderman
- Paulie Germano
- Anand Kanagala
- Jeff Provost
- Jason Simmons
- Eiichi Tanda
- Jim Wanderer
- Urs Hölzle
- Stephen Stuart
- Amin Vahdat
Abstract
We present our approach for overcoming the cost, operational complexity, and limited scale endemic to datacenter networks a decade ago. Three themes unify the five generations of datacenter networks detailed in this paper. First, multi-stage Clos topologies built from commodity switch silicon can support cost-effective deployment of building-scale networks. Second, much of the general, but complex, decentralized network routing and management protocols supporting arbitrary deployment scenarios were overkill for single-operator, pre-planned datacenter networks. We built a centralized control mechanism based on a global configuration pushed to all datacenter switches. Third, modular hardware design coupled with simple, robust software allowed our design to also support inter-cluster and wide-area networks. Our datacenter networks run at dozens of sites across the planet, scaling in capacity by 100x over ten years to more than 1Pbps of bisection bandwidth.
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