Network Traffic Characteristics of Data Centers in the Wild

摘要

Although there is tremendous interest in designing improved networks for data centers, very little is known about the network-level traffic characteristics of current data centers. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of the network traffic in 10 data centers belonging to three different types of organizations, including university, enterprise, and cloud data centers. Our definition of cloud data centers includes not only data centers employed by large online service providers offering Internet-facing applications, but also data centers used to host data-intensive (MapReduce style) applications. We collect and analyze SNMP statistics, topology, and packet-level traces. We examine the range of applications deployed in these data centers and their placement, the flow-level and packet-level transmission properties of these applications, and their impact on network utilization, link utilization, congestion, and packet drops. We describe the implications of the observed traffic patterns for data center internal traffic engineering as well as for recently-proposed architectures for data center networks.