Network Requirements for Resource Disaggregation

Traditional datacenters are designed as a collection of servers, each of which tightly couples the resources required for computing tasks. Recent industry trends suggest a paradigm shift to a disaggregated datacenter (DDC) architecture containing a pool of resources, each built as a standalone resource blade and interconnected using a network fabric. A key enabling (or blocking) factor for disaggregation will be the network – to support good application-level performance it becomes critical that the network fabric provide low latency communication even under the increased traffic load that disaggregation introduces. In this paper, we use a workload-driven approach to derive the minimum latency and bandwidth requirements that the network in disaggregated datacenters must provide to avoid degrading application-level performance and explore the feasibility of meeting these requirements with existing system designs and commodity networking technology.