Modeling and Evaluation of a Data Center Sovereignty

Technology Sovereignty aims at protecting the interests of the consumers belonging to a sovereign state. The new laws on network sovereignty monitor and govern networks inside a state. They protect the constitutional rights of citizens and ensure data security. However, they do not focus on the infrastructure and hardware associated with these networks. Ensuring a robust end-to-end network fuels the need for reliable hardware manufacturers and an appropriate network architecture that can handle multiple failures efficiently. To understand technological sovereignty in communication networks, the Data Center Network (DCN) is targeted as it is a critical part of the digital society. Data centers are dedicated physical facilities that act as storage houses for large amounts of data. Though several fault-tolerance studies have been performed in DCNs, none have studied the role of hardware manufacturers in DCN Sovereignty. The unavailability of components from a manufacturer can lead to multiple failures. So, it is necessary to build a sovereign DCN without creating a dependency on the manufacturer(s). In this work, to evaluate the sovereignty of a DCN, (i) Multiple failure scenarios depending on manufacturer reliability are evaluated, and (ii) Design guidelines on how to choose the number of hardware manufacturers and how to arrange them in the DCN topology are presented.