Summary: Network Traffic Characteristics of Data Centers in the Wild
Theophilus Benson
, Aditya Akella
and David A. Maltz

University of Wisconsin­Madison

Microsoft Research­Redmond
ABSTRACT
Although there is tremendous interest in designing improved net-
works for data centers, very little is known about the network-level
traffic characteristics of current data centers. In this paper, we con-
duct an empirical study of the network traffic in 10 data centers
belonging to three different types of organizations, including uni-
versity, enterprise, and cloud data centers. Our definition of cloud
data centers includes not only data centers employed by large on-
line service providers offering Internet-facing applications, but also
data centers used to host data-intensive (MapReduce style) appli-
cations. We collect and analyze SNMP statistics, topology, and
packet-level traces. We examine the range of applications deployed

Source: Akella, Aditya - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Liblit, Ben - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences