The Role of Ethernet in Consolidation and Virtualization

WhitePAPER
The High Performance Data Center: The Role of Ethernet in Consolidation and Virtualization
Abstract
While the 90s were about information, today is about answers. Answers drive our society. Whether you are a searchengine, a Fortune 500 company, or a researcher at a national laboratory, answers are your business and the ability toprovide them quickly and cost effectively is a distinct competitive advantage.Today's high performance data center needs to generate answers rapidly and requires that the right people can seamlessly access those answers. Answers are dynamic and must be accurate. Additionally, the more accurate answers a business can produce in a given time, the more revenue it can generate. And as the world and workforces disperse,there must be fast and reliable connections from anywhere at any time for the data center to help increase efficiencyand competitiveness.Enabling the rise of this high performance data center are the following technological changes:. High performance, cost-effective computing. High-speed storage access and backup. Embedded security and dynamic denial of service protection. High-speed, congestion-free networks. Virtualizing a centralized network and assetsTo ensure accuracy and speed of answers, a high performance cluster computing architecture that leverages the totalprocessing power of a business is required. With a cluster computing architecture in place, businesses can then feed itwith information.The ability to rapidly access stored information and answers is crucial to interpreting available information. Thisrequires high-speed access and backup to a storage network. If answers are revenue, it is important to ensure that theright people are accessing the right content. Advanced dynamic denial of service protection and embedded security atthe system level are required to limit and allow access where, when and by whom it is needed.Next, making the disparate pieces of the data center infrastructure work together requires a high performance network. No longer simply providing transportation, but linking tens of thousands of servers, databases and other computational resources, the network becomes involved in the creation of the answers. As such, it must be both fastand congestion-free to ensure accurate answers are delivered rapidly. And it is resilient, high capacity systems that provide the scalability and availability to seamlessly interconnect the pieces of potentially geographically distributedinfrastructure.Finally, the distinction between centralized storage and computing versus distributed storage and computing must betransparent to the user community. By enabling anytime access to the network from any external locations, businessescan more effectively leverage their infrastructure to create answers.In today's high performance data center, where information transformed into answers is the currency, information technology is regaining its role as a strategic asset that enables competitive advantages. This white paper explores the technologies needed to ensure businesses are prepared to meet the new challenges and opportunities of the emerging "answer economy".
© 2 0 0 6 F O R C E 1 0 N E T W O R K S , I N C . [ P A G E 1 O F 1 7 ]Introduction approach is needed in order to make the right tradeoffsbetween the additional capital expenditure required andMany IT organizations are currently working to solve the savings to be gained by improving resource utiliza-the problems created by the explosive expansion of IT tion and reducing operational costs via simplification ofinfrastructure in the late 1990's. In many instances this the infrastructure. In particular the TCO assessment hasrapid expansion to meet business unit demand for IT to address the hidden costs of configuring, managing andhas resulted in a highly complex infrastructure that supporting distributed and dispersed environments asoffers sub-optimal reliability and security while being new technologies are considered for deployment.overly difficult to manage and expensive to operate. Data center consolidation and architectural re-assessmentSome of the symptoms of excessive IT complexity are is often planned in the context of an overall IT programthe following: to improve the alignment of IT with business goals,. Numerous data centers distributed throughout the reduce operating costs, and improve business continuity,organization, including ad hoc patchwork... [download for more]