White Papers: Networking

The data center has gone through several major evolutionary changes over the past several decades, and each change has been defined by major shifts in computing. The shift to a virtual data center will be the single biggest transition in the history of computing. This transition will reshape all the major data center tiers: applications, storage, servers and the network. This paper examines the drivers of this transition, provides real-world case studies and includes data centre fabric best practices.

Low cost servers, used for applications such as sales force automation and workgroup collaboration, had contributed to server sprawl, causing the data center to outgrow available power and cooling capacity. Server virtualisation helped but had begun to slow network performance. “We wanted 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity without the expense of building a new data center,” says Rory Regan, network and telecom manager, Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated. “We decided to build a new data center network that would continue to work with our existing servers and storage as we gradually migrated to a unified fabric.” Read this case study

The increasing adoption of server virtualization in the data center is driving greater consolidation, reducing power usage, and increasing both availability and resiliency. However, server virtualization brings with it a set of operational challenges on the networking side: from dealing with configuration challenges around Virtual Machine (VM) switching to managing virtual machine mobility in the network, to providing virtual machine location and inventory in the network. Today, there are few tools available to the network administrator that provides visibility, control and insight into the virtual machine environment.