On the Workload Deployment, Resource Utilization and Operational Cost of Fast Optical Switch Based Rack-Scale Disaggregated Data Center Network

We investigate operational performance of a novel rack-scale disaggregated network. Results show that the disaggregated network achieves 30.6% higher workloads acceptance rate, 12.9% higher resource utilization, and 33% more power saving compared with the server-centric.

1. Introduction

The rapidly increasing of big data applications ranging from computing intensive (e.g. Hadoop and Spark) to network intensive (e.g. web search and media streaming) have diversified IT resource (CPU, memory, storage and network) requirements. To serve these emerging applications, flexible resource provision is demanded in data center (DC) networks. However, the fixed IT resource embedded in the server results in low resource utilization, high upgrade cost, and power waste in current DC [1]. As a promising solution, disaggregated networks like "dRedBox" [2] releases all the IT resource from the server in order to provision fine granularity IT resource. Nonetheless, there are several challenges to implement the disaggregated network. Powerful network interconnection with low latency, high bandwidth and high scalability should be developed to replace the high speed bus in the server.