Understanding data center traffic characteristics

Abstract

As data centers become more and more central in Internet communications, both research and operations communities have begun to explore how to better design and manage them. In this paper, we present a preliminary empirical study of end-to-end traffic patterns in data center networks that can inform and help evaluate research and operational approaches. We analyze SNMP logs collected at 19 data centers to examine temporal and spatial variations in link loads and losses. We find that while links in the core are heavily utilized the ones closer to the edge observe a greater degree of loss. We then study packet traces collected at a small number of switches in one data center and find evidence of ON-OFF traffic behavior. Finally, we develop a framework that derives ON-OFF traffic parameters for data center traffic sources that best explain the SNMP data collected for the data center. We show that the framework can be used to evaluate data center traffic engineering approaches. We are also applying the framework to design network-level traffic generators for data centers.

Hardware-Software Co-Design for Network Performance Measurement

“…The 8-way associative cache (m=8) is an 8-way LRU similar to many processor L1 caches [8]. Based on a study of datacenter traffic [16], we pick an average packet size of 850 bytes and a network utilization of 30%. Under these typical conditions, a switch processing a billion 64-byte packets per second (1 GHz) will process 22.6M average-sized packets per second.…”

An Evaluation of Load Balancing between Server Platforms inside a Data Center

“…The structure and main component of data centre architecture is depicted on Figure 1. The major components of architecture are [2]: Client or and users that interact with the clouds to manage information related to the cloud.…”

“…The cloud infrastructure configuration and future maintains in the most cases is determine by the provided applications and the processes. In general, two types of servers are existed in data centre [1,2]. Front End server receives and handles incoming traffic and multiple application Middle End servers that running applications.…”

“…Multiple cloud technologies of data storage and computing, network virtualization and data flows aggregation was provided to the IT industry with aim to increase the scalability and flexibility of network solutions. However, each new approach makes the infrastructure of data center more complex [2]. The different load balancing technologies are using to achieve a high level of processed load between components of data centre.…”

Network Element Scheduling for Achieving Energy-Aware Data Center Networks

“…Besides, we can leverage the existing mechanisms such as SNMP Set operations and command line interface to support the power control features of NESS. Moreover, the network analyzer can collect the state records of traffic and topology through SNMP Get operations and passive packet tracing [28].…”