GHB: a cost-effective and energy-efficient data center network structure with greater incremental scalability

Designing a cost-effective, energy-efficient and highly scalable network for data centers that can deliver sufficient bandwidth has drawn tremendous attentions recently. The data center networks constructed by using multi-port servers can provide sufficient bandwidth, such as BCube, DCell and GBC3. As the volume of data keeps growing rapidly, more and more servers are continuously added into data centers. In order to reduce the cost and energy consumption, data center networks can be expanded gradually by adding a small number of servers from time to time instead of adding a huge number of servers at a time. This paper proposes a new type of data center network structure called GHB, which is constructed by using commercial switches and multi-port servers. Two types of incomplete GHB structures are also proposed. A small number of servers can be gradually added into the incomplete structures without changing their topological properties. As shown in the experimental results, the throughput of GHB is comparable to that of BCube, and is larger than that of GBC3 and DCell. The analysis results indicate that GHB strikes a good balance among diameter, bisection width, incremental scalability, cost, and energy consumption in contrast to BCube, DCell and GBC3. Compared with the BCube and GBC3, GHB reduces the cost and energy consumption by about 6% and 18%, respectively. The highest throughput of GHB is higher than that of DCell and GBC3 by about 3.4% and 8.35%, respectively.