A Design for Resilient Datacenter Networks

The datacenter networks we use today are based on a 50-year-old design. While it has served us well, that design no longer meets the needs of today's distributed applications. The result is failures visible to the users of those applications in spite of developers’ best efforts. We believe it is time to provide a new design, one that takes into account what today's applications need. To that end, we have developed a network architecture that starts at the physical layer and extends to the way applications communicate and how they are managed. A key design goal is the ability to recover from network failures so fast that applications perceive an unbreakable network.