A Hybrid Network Architecture for Data Centers

In recent years, the concept of Big Data (BD) analytics has brought rapid changes to the way enterprises conduct business. Everyday more organizations are getting into the cloud of BD users. Due to an influx of data analytic projects, data centers and cloud-based service providers have experienced massive growth. A growth engulfed with impetuous increase of data and the rapid rise of Internet traffic has resulted in data centers facing new challenges. At the same time, service providers must meet the demands of cloud computing and emerging web applications. To fulfill those requirements, number of servers in a rack are increasing quickly with servers connected to high bandwidth switches. Present data center networks based on electrical packet switching have many disadvantages. Electrical links consume much power and have bottleneck issues. They are often not suitable to provide low latency at high throughput. A promising solution involves optical circuit switch links in the data center. Research in optical fibers has gained attention for providing high throughput, low latency, and incredibly low energy consumption. In this paper, we present a hybrid electrical and optical networking topology for data centers used in cloud computing and Big Data applications. Furthermore, we explain the reasons how the proposed architecture helps in improvements related to the performance of the data centers.