DTS: A Dual Transport Switching Scheme for RDMA-based Applications

RDMA has been widely adopted by distributed applications for its low latency, high throughput, and near-zero CPU overhead. However, high availability is still lacked for RDMA-based applications, especially in the cases of network failure or NIC upgrade. In this paper, we propose DTS, a scheme for RDMA-based applications to provide high availability by adopting the active and standby transports and switching them transparently and fast when necessary. We implement the prototype of DTS based on the Libfabric RxD provider. Our evaluation demonstrates that with DTS existing RDMA-based applications can be deployed with zero downtime and the performance degradation is ignorable.