Upgrading Network Architecture to 10 Gigabit Ethernet

2 www.intel.com/IT
IT@Intel White Paper Upgrading Data Center Network Architecture to 10 Gigabit Ethernet
Contents
Executive Overview ............................. 1
Background ............................................ 2
Solution ................................................... 2
Simplifying Virtualization for
Office and Enterprise Applications .. 3
Increasing Throughput and
Reducing Latency for Design
Applications ........................................ 4
Choosing the Right
Network Components ...................... 4
Future Plans for Office
and Enterprise I/O and
Storage Consolidation ....................... 4
Conclusion .............................................. 5
Acronyms ................................................ 5
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BACKGROUND
Intel’s 97 data centers are at the center
of a massive worldwide computing
environment, occupying almost
460,000 square feet and housing
approximately 100,000 servers. These
servers support five main computing
application areas, often referred to as
“DOMES”: Design engineering, Office,
Manufacturing, Enterprise, and Services.
Intel’s rapidly growing business requirements
place increasing demands on data center
resources. Intel IT is engaged in a verticalization
strategy that examines each application area
and provides technology solutions that meet
specific business needs. We are also developing
an Office and Enterprise private cloud, and we
see opportunities to expand cloud computing
to support manufacturing.
These strategies, combined with the following
significant trends in several computing
application areas, compelled us to evaluate
whether our existing 1 gigabit Ethernet (GbE)
network infrastructure was sufficient to meet
network infrastructure requirements.
• Large-scale virtualization in the Office
and Enterprise computing domains.
• Increasing compute density in the
Design computing domain.
In addition, high-performance Intel® processors
and clustering technologies are rapidly
increasing file server performance. This means
that the network, not the file servers, is the
limiting factor in supporting faster throughput.
Our Internet connection requirements are
growing 40 percent each year as well, which
requires faster connectivity than is possible
with a 1 GbE data center fabric.
SOLUTION
To meet these demands, we
determined it was necessary to
convert our data center network
architecture from 100 megabit per
second (Mb/s) and 1 GbE connections
to 10 GbE connections. Our new 10 GbE
data center fabric design will meet
current needs while positioning us to
incorporate new technology to meet
future network requirements.
For example, the 10 GbE network will simplify
the virtualized host architecture used for
Office and Enterprise computing, and will also
reduce network component cost. For Design
computing, the 10 GbE network will reduce
latency and allow faster application response
times without the expense associated
with alternative low-latency systems such
as InfiniBand*. And, although storage area
networks (SANs) in the Office and Enterprise
application areas currently use a separate
Fibre Channel (FC) fabric, we anticipate that
as 10 GbE technology matures, we will
be able to consolidate the SANs onto the
10 GbE network—thereby reducing network
complexity even further.