FlatNet: Towards a flatter data center network

The design of the data center network that interconnects the massive number of servers is very important to ensure the agility and robustness of the data center to meet the requirements of the applications. In response to this challenge, the research community have begun exploring novel interconnect topologies including FatTree, DCell, BCube, HyPaC, etc. However, the solutions proposed so far either scale too slowly, suffer from performance bottlenecks, are server-location dependent, inherit poor availability, or can be too complex/expensive to construct. Motivated by these very important challenges, we propose a new data center interconnect called FlatNet that combines the advantages of previous architectures while avoiding their limitations. FlatNet is a cost-effective, high-performance, reliable and scalable interconnect with almost flat architecture. For example, given an equal-sized data center, the costs of a FlatNet in terms of number of links and switches are roughly 2/3 and 2/5 that of Portland, while still delivering comparable overall performance.