A comparative analysis of data center network architectures

Advances in data intensive computing and high performance computing facilitate rapid scaling of data center networks, resulting in a growing body of research exploring new network architectures that enhance scalability, cost effectiveness and performance. Understanding the tradeoffs between these different network architectures could not only help data center operators improve deployments, but also assist system designers to optimize applications running on top of them. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of several well known data center network architectures using important metrics, and present our results on different network topologies. We show the tradeoffs between these topologies and present implications on practical data center implementations.