Driving 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adoption in the Data Center
DRIVING 10 GIGABIT ETHERNET ADOPTION IN THE DATA CENTER
3
ETHERNET-BASED STORAGE
Ethernet-based storage offerings provide huge volumes of
connected data at attractive prices. As these storage offerings
continue to evolve and improve, organizations can adopt
strategies to consolidate their storage infrastructure in the
data center on an Ethernet network achieving improved
economies of scale and simplified management of the
infrastructure all delivered at an affordable cost.
Today, Ethernet-based network attached storage (NAS) and
storage area network (SAN) systems are being deployed by
large and small organizations to realize these benefits. The
ability to scale storage delivery performance up to 10 gigabits
per second gives these organizations a simple and cohesive
migration path for their NAS and SAN storage systems.
SERVER CLUSTERING
Another major trend is data centers clustering together servers
to improve performance and application availability. It is
not uncommon to hear of physical server deployments in the
hundreds consolidated in a single data center. Applications are
being rewritten to take advantage of the parallel processing
paradigm made available through server clustering to improve
not only application performance, but also application
availability. Ethernet is becoming the de facto choice for
clustering servers in a network. Using inter-processor
communication (IPC) over an Ethernet network, applications
can deliver higher degrees of parallelization as long as the
network throughput delivers the required performance.
The ability to migrate to 10 Gigabit Ethernet clustered
interconnect solutions provides customers the ability to scale
parallelized applications without the turmoil of moving to a
different network technology to realize increased bandwidth,
lower latencies, and better performance.
WEB 2.0
It has been estimated that the volume of web traffic will
experience a fifty-fold increase by the year 2015. What’s
driving this web traffic increase? Today, we have the delivery
of video, image, and audio content. Eight hours of video
content is loaded onto YouTube* every minute. In the near
future, online video will transition to high-definition (HD)
video, which is seven to ten times more bandwidth-hungry
than today’s video streams. Corporate delivery of information
both externally in describing products and services and
internally for training and information delivery will be
delivered through HD video and audio streams. To handle
these vast bandwidth requirements traffic management
appliances will be required to spread out the workload to
clustered servers in a server load-balancing configuration.
To support this performance demand requires network
performance that is equal to the task. No longer will Gigabit
Ethernet be sufficient to respond to the demands of advances
in the Web 2.0 Internet. Addressing this challenge will be
10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions that drive through the traffic
management appliances directly to the web-facing servers
handling Web 2.0’s data-intensive requests.
DIGITAL IMAGING AND EDITING
One of the fastest advances in technology has been in the area
ofdigitalimaging.By2010,itisestimatedthatmedicalimaging
alone will consume 30 percent of the world’s data storage.
Human interaction with digital images will be through a global
interconnected network as productivity gains are realized by
effectively using this information form. To move hundreds of
gigabytes of digital content to computers in a timely fashion for
display and revision will require rethinking the infrastructure
and cabling requirements for computers.
COST
When the 10 Gigabit Ethernet specification was released in
2002, the cost of early 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings exceeded
USD 10,000 per port. The only rational use at this price
was in the core of the network. Extreme Networks can now
deliver 10 Gigabit Ethernet at a cost of USD 500 per port.
With this cost advantage, 10 Gigabit Ethernet will move out
of the core and access layers of the network to the network
edge. 10 Gigabit Ethernet adoption will further accelerate
the market for copper-based adapters and switches making
network infrastructure costs even more reasonable.