ABSTRACT
We present the first large-scale analysis of failures in a data center network. Through our analysis, we seek to answer several fundamental questions: which devices/links are most unreliable, what causes failures, how do failures impact network traffic and how effective is network redundancy? We answer these questions using multiple data sources commonly collected by network operators. The key findings of our study are that (1) data center networks show high reliability, (2) commodity switches such as ToRs and AggS are highly reliable, (3) load balancers dominate in terms of failure occurrences with many short-lived software related faults,(4) failures have potential to cause loss of many small packets such as keep alive messages and ACKs, and (5) network redundancy is only 40% effective in reducing the median impact of failure.
Supplemental Material
- Cisco: Data center: Load balancing data center services, 2004. www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns340/ns517/ns224/ns668/net_implementation_white_paper0900aecd8053495a.html.Google Scholar
- H. Abu-Libdeh, P. Costa, A. I. T. Rowstron, G. O'Shea, and A. Donnelly. Symbiotic routing in future data centers. In SIGCOMM, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Al-Fares, A. Loukissas, and A. Vahdat. A scalable, commodity data center network architecture. In SIGCOMM, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Alizadeh, A. Greenberg, D. Maltz, J. Padhye, P. Patel, B. Prabhakar, S. Sengupta, and M. Sridharan. Data Center TCP (DCTCP). In SIGCOMM, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. Benson, A. Akella, and D. Maltz. Network traffic characteristics of data centers in the wild. In IMC, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. Benson, S. Sahu, A. Akella, and A. Shaikh. A first look at problems in the cloud. In HotCloud, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Brodkin. Amazon EC2 outage calls "availability zones" into question, 2011. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/042111-amazon-ec2-zones.html.Google Scholar
- X. Chen, Y. Mao, Z. M. Mao, and K. van de Merwe. Declarative configuration management for complex and dynamic networks. In CoNEXT, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cisco. UniDirectional Link Detection (UDLD). http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk866/tsd_technology_support_sub-protocol_home.html.Google Scholar
- Cisco. Spanning tree protocol root guard enhancement, 2011. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk389/tk621/technologies_tech_note09186a00800ae96b.shtml.Google Scholar
- D. Ford, F. Labelle, F. Popovici, M. Stokely, V.-A. Truong, L. Barroso, C. Grimes, and S. Quinlan. Availability in globally distributed storage systems. In OSDI, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Greenberg, J. Hamilton, N. Jain, S. Kandula, C. Kim, P. Lahiri, D. Maltz, P. Patel, and S. Sengupta. VL2: A scalable and flexible data center network. In SIGCOMM, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Guo, H. Wu, K. Tan, L. Shiy, Y. Zhang, and S. Lu. DCell: A scalable and fault-tolerant network structure for data centers. In SIGCOMM, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Guo, H. Wu, K. Tan, L. Shiy, Y. Zhang, and S. Lu. BCube: A high performance, server-centric network architecture for modular data centers. In SIGCOMM, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Joseph, A. Tavakoli, and I. Stoica. A policy-aware switching layer for data centers. In SIGCOMM, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Kandula, R. Mahajan, P. Verkaik, S. Agarwal, J. Padhye, and P. Bahl. Detailed diagnosis in enterprise networks. In SIGCOMM, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Kim, M. Caesar, and J. Rexford. Floodless in SEATTLE: a scalable ethernet architecture for large enterprises. In SIGCOMM, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Labovitz and A. Ahuja. Experimental study of internet stability and wide-area backbone failures. In The Twenty-Ninth Annual International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Markopoulou, G. Iannaccone, S. Bhattacharyya, C.-N. Chuah, Y. Ganjali, and C. Diot. Characterization of failures in an operational IP backbone network. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N. Mckeown, T. Anderson, H. Balakrishnan, G. Parulkar, L. Peterson, J. Rexford, S. Shenker, and J. Turner. Openflow: enabling innovation in campus networks. In SIGCOMM CCR, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. N. Mysore, A. Pamboris, N. Farrington, N. Huang, P. Miri, S. Radhakrishnan, V. Subramanya, and A. Vahdat. PortLand: A scalable fault-tolerant layer 2 data center network fabric. In SIGCOMM, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- V. Padmanabhan, S. Ramabhadran, S. Agarwal, and J. Padhye. A study of end-to-end web access failures. In CoNEXT, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Schroeder and G. Gibson. Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean too you? In FAST, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Schroeder, E. Pinheiro, and W.-D. Weber. DRAM errors in the wild: A large-scale field study. In SIGMETRICS, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Shaikh, C. Isett, A. Greenberg, M. Roughan, and J. Gottlieb. A case study of OSPF behavior in a large enterprise network. In ACM IMW, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Turner, K. Levchenko, A. C. Snoeren, and S. Savage. California fault lines: Understanding the causes and impact of network failures. In SIGCOMM, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. V. Vishwanath and N. Nagappan. Characterizing cloud computing hardware reliability. In Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Watson, F. Jahanian, and C. Labovitz. Experiences with monitoring OSPF on a regional service provider network. In ICDCS, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Understanding network failures in data centers: measurement, analysis, and implications
Recommendations
A Large Scale Study of Data Center Network Reliability
IMC '18: Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018The ability to tolerate, remediate, and recover from network incidents (caused by device failures and fiber cuts, for example) is critical for building and operating highly-available web services. Achieving fault tolerance and failure preparedness ...
Understanding network failures in data centers: measurement, analysis, and implications
SIGCOMM '11We present the first large-scale analysis of failures in a data center network. Through our analysis, we seek to answer several fundamental questions: which devices/links are most unreliable, what causes failures, how do failures impact network traffic ...
Reliability in layered networks with random link failures
We consider network reliability in layered networks where the lower layer experiences random link failures. In layered networks, each failure at the lower layer may lead to multiple failures at the upper layer. We generalize the classical polynomial ...
Comments