The Lippis Report

By 3Com

The industry is a buzz around Ethernet’s emergence as the unifying data center network fabric of choice.  Although 10GigE is very attractive as a unifying fabric — prices are dropping and adoption is rising — we’re still a long way from a unifying fabric in the data center. According to Nemertes, nearly 63% of organizations have no plans for network storage over 10GigE, while 71% have no plan yet to converge data center switching fabrics into one unified fabric. Standards organizations are still working to address the key challenges of latency, loss, and performance at scale, which are required to ensure that a converged infrastructure performs effectively for all data center applications.   For most organizations, the best approach may be evolutionary – one in which converging parts of the network such as access layer (in-the-rack) help address server/storage I/O complexity with higher performance 10GigE Converged Network Adaptors (CNAs) – makes good sense in the near term. As the enterprise needs for agility and lowered TCO converge with standards-based resilience and reliability, we will eventually arrive at the “data center over Ethernet” (DCoE).
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