Research on maintainability of network topology for data centers

With the growth of data center (DC) size, the network topology becomes complicated and the maintenance workload increases significantly. To evaluate the workload, this paper presents a metric named MNT, Maintainability of Networking Topology. MNT consists of numbers of definitions of DC network model, such as cost of maintaining a node, cost of maintaining a link and recursive level. They can quantify the topology maintainability and provide a better way to compare different topologies. The results from theoretical analysis and applications show that MNT is effective.