Queue - Storage
IBM intelligent Bricks project: petabytes and beyond
IBM Journal of Research and Development
RouteBricks: exploiting parallelism to scale software routers
Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 22nd symposium on Operating systems principles
Scale-Out Networking in the Data Center
IEEE Micro
B4: experience with a globally-deployed software defined wan
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM
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In data centers today, servers are stationary and data flows on a hierarchical network of switches and routers. But such static server arrangements require very scalable networks, and many applications are bottlenecked by network bandwidth. In addition, server density is kept low to enable maintenance and upgrades, as well as to increase air flow. In this paper, we propose a design in which servers move physically, and communicate via point-to-point connections (instead of switches). We argue that this allows data transfer bandwidth to scale linearly with the number of servers, and that moving servers is not as expensive as it sounds, at least in terms of power consumption. Moreover, while servers move around, they regularly reach the perimeters of the system, which helps with heat dissipation and with servicing of failed nodes. This design also helps in traditional switch-based networks, to improve density and maintainability.