A disaster-resilient multi-content optical datacenter network architecture

Cloud services based on datacenter networks are becoming very important. Optical networks are well suited to meet the demands set by the high volume of traffic between datacenters, given their high bandwidth and low-latency characteristics. In such networks, path protection against network failures is generally ensured by providing a backup path to the same destination, which is link-disjoint to the primary path. This protection fails to protect against disasters covering an area which disrupts both primary and backup resources. Also, content/service protection is a fundamental problem in datacenter networks, as the failure of a single datacenter should not cause the disappearance of a specific content/service from the network. Content placement, routing and protection of paths and content are closely related to one another, so the interaction among these should be studied together. In this work, we propose an integrated ILP formulation to design an optical datacenter network, which solves all the above-mentioned problems simultaneously. We show that our disaster protection scheme exploiting anycasting provides more protection, but uses less capacity, than dedicated single-link protection. We also show that a reasonable number of datacenters and selective content replicas with intelligent network design can provide survivability to disasters while supporting user demands.