The Transition to 10 Gigabit Ethernet Unified Networking: Cisco and Intel Lead the Way

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e Transition to 10 Gigabit Ethernet Unied Networking: Cisco and Intel Lead the Way
SIMPLIFYING THE NETWORK
WITH 10 GIGABIT ETHERNET
As IT departments look for ways
to reduce costs and improve
server eciency, they are turning
increasingly to server virtualization
and consolidation. e benets
of virtualization are widely
understood: less server hardware
to purchase, reduced power and
cooling needs, and centralized
management. Today’s servers are
based on powerful new processors,
including the Intel® Xeon® processor
5600 and 7500 series, that support
more virtual machines per physical
host than ever before, helping IT
achieve greater consolidation ratios.
• elatestgenerationofIntelXeon
processors enables IT to consolidate
servers at a 15:1 ratio, delivering power
savings of up to 90 percent and a
5-month return on investment (ROI).
• Newfour-socketprocessorsare
delivering 20 times the performance
of previous-generation processors.
• Nearly50percentofthefour-socket
servers shipped today are being used
for virtualization.
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Unfortunately, the success achieved by
many organizations in attaining these
benets has been hindered by past practices
for networking virtualized servers. As
virtual machine density increases, a physical
server’s networking needs also increase,
adding both cost and complexity. A typical
virtualized server contains 8 to 10 Gigabit
Ethernet LAN ports and 2 dedicated SAN
ports (Figure 1).
As the use of server virtualization
continues to grow, 10 Gigabit Ethernet
unied networking is simplifying server
connectivity (Figure 2). Consolidating
the trac of multiple Gigabit Ethernet
connections onto a single 10 Gigabit
Ethernet adapter signicantly reduces
cable and infrastructure complexity and
overall total cost of ownership (TCO).
Enhancements to the Ethernet standard
also enable 10 Gigabit Ethernet support for
both LAN and SAN trac, allowing IT to
achieve further benets by converging data
and storage infrastructures. As a result of its
ubiquity, cost eectiveness, exibility, and
ease of use, Ethernet has emerged as the
unied data center fabric.
10 GIGABIT ETHERNET:
THE FABRIC OF CLOUD
COMPUTING
e growth in server virtualization has
helped data center networks evolve from
discrete, siloed infrastructures to more
exible fabrics with the scalability and
agility necessary to address the needs of
new usage models and provide an excellent
foundation for enterprise cloud computing.
More than 2.5 billion users will connect to
the Internet in the next 5 years
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with more
than 10 billion devices.
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is usage will
require eight times the amount of storage
capacity, 16 times the network capacity,
and more than 20 times the computing
capacity by 2015.
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A new infrastructure
must emerge to power this growth and
Figure 1. Multiple gigabit Ethernet connections in a typical virtualized server.
Figure 2. Simplified server connectivity using 10 Gigabit Ethernet.