Achieving a fault tolerant and reliable cloud data center network

The need for a robust data center that is fault tolerant can never be overemphasized, especially nowadays that the advent of big data traffic, internet of things and other on-demand internet applications are on the increase. The rate at which these data are transferred across the internet is worrisome, and a thing of concern to the data center developers. The emergence of ubiquitous computing has also aided to the increase in traffic across the internet, because computing occurs more now by use of any device, in any location, and in any format. These issues have compounded the management of Cloud Data Center used for storage, transfer, and analysis of data across the cloud; as a result, the data center network devices become prone to failures, which automatically impacts on its performance. Nevertheless, several researchers have come up with solutions, though not sufficient to mitigate these issues. Therefore, on our part, we realised that architectural design of data center network is the bedrock of having a fault tolerant, reliable, robust, and congestion free network. So, this paper, which is an extension of our previous works, based on an improved version of Fat Tree (called Z-node); we proposed a Hybrid fat tree design and compared it with Single fat tree design, for client to server communication pattern such as HTTP and EMAIL applications. The simulation results obtained with different device failures and traffic rate patterns, show that the Hybrid fat tree design performed better than the Single fat tree design, hence will be the best bet for the transfer and analysis of big data in cloud data center network.