Differentiated latency in data center networks with erasure coded files through traffic engineering

Abstract

This paper proposes an algorithm to minimize weighted service latency for different classes of tenants (or service classes) in a data center network where erasure-coded files are stored on distributed disks/racks and access requests are scattered across the network. Due to the limited bandwidth available at both top-of-the-rack and aggregation switches, and differentiated service requirements of the tenants, network bandwidth must be apportioned among different intra- and inter-rack data flows for different service classes in line with their traffic statistics. We formulate this problem as weighted queuing and employ a class of probabilistic request scheduling policies to derive a closed-form upper-bound of service latency for erasure-coded storage with arbitrary file access patterns and service time distributions. The result enables us to propose a joint weighted latency (over different service classes) optimization over three entangled control knobs: the bandwidth allocation at top-of-the-rack and aggregation switches for different service classes, dynamic scheduling of file requests, and the placement of encoded file chunks (i.e., data locality). The joint optimization is shown to be a mixed-integer problem. We develop an iterative algorithm which decouples and solves the joint optimization as 3 sub-problems, which are either convex or solvable via bipartite matching in polynomial time. The proposed algorithm is prototyped in an open-source, distributed file system, Tahoe, and evaluated on a cloud testbed with 16 separate physical hosts in an OpenStack cluster using Cisco switches. Experiments validate our theoretical latency analysis and show significant latency reduction for diverse file access patterns. The results provide valuable insights on designing low-latency data center networks with erasure coded storage.