The Inevitable All-Ethernet Data Center?

The inevitable all-ethernet data center?  Extreme Networks Makes the Case.

Over the past 15 years, the Internet has changed global communications, business processes, and consumer behavior in an unprecedented way. This change caused many organizations to consolidate data centers and build new types of web applications for rapid development and integration needs. As a result, data centers have become massive collections of servers, networks, storage, and security devices in a constant state of growth and change. Data centers have become the 24×7 foundation of today’s global business world. Rapidly changing business requirements make managing these data centers a real challenge for IT. The data center must be highly available and resilient enough to fail over gracefully to other facilities if need be. Data centers must be able to meet current needs, but also provide enough headroom for unanticipated future requirements. Data centers must be extremely secure in order to detect and prevent increasingly ominous threats. Finally, data centers must have the ability to move lots of traffic across servers, storage devices, and public and private networks. It is a belief that these extraordinary technical demands will be anchored by resilient flexible networking infrastructure based upon Ethernet technologies.

10Gb Ethernet will become the data center foundation. As prices rapidly decline, 10GbE switches will become standard equipment for connecting a multitude of virtual servers in growing data centers throughout the world. This trend has already begun and will likely accelerate in spite of current economic woes. Over the next few years, 10GbE will be replaced with 40GbE and 100GbE in the same pattern.

Ethernet will ultimately replace legacy transports. Just as TCP/IP and Ethernet proliferated in voice, metropolitan, and video applications, Ethernet will also replace other networking technologies like Fibre Channel and Infiniband over time. This transition will be driven by ever-increasing Ethernet bandwidth combined with new standards and hardware offload processors.

CIOs should plan for the all Ethernet data center. IT executives must create data center designs that embrace 10GbE today and expand Ethernet use over time. To do so, CIOs should follow technology progress, maximize network flexibility, and work with vendors like Extreme Networks that can meet short and long term requirements.

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