The Lippis Report

March 17th, 2010

In addition to desktop connectivity wiring closet switches now connect wireless access points, laptops, kiosks, netbooks, IP phones, printers, video desktop systems and more while also managing electrical power of the devices they connect. New PoE Plus standard 802.3at allow 30W per port to be delivered which has driven a change in wiring closet power management. I talk with Berna Devrim, Sr. Manager, Access Switching Marketing at Cisco Systems about the dynamics forcing a change in wiring closet switching and the new Cisco X and S series of edge switching products which represent progressive thinking in this space. Enjoy, Nick.

January 11th, 2010

By Arista

The standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (IEEE802.3ae) was ratified in 2002. While 10GbE deployments have grown every year since then, the technology has primarily been used to interconnect switches and routers. Almost all of the server connections in data centers have remained at 1 Gbps, limiting the amount of network throughput available to each server. With recent enhancements in CPU performance, system I/O, and storage I/O the gigabit network has increasingly become the application and workload performance bottleneck.
The primary reason for staying with Gigabit Ethernet has been cost-performance. Until recently it has been more cost-effective to have multiple GbE connections rather than a single 10 GbE port. In addition, most installed servers typically cannot utilize the full bandwidth of a 10 GbE connection. However both of these factors are changing, which are leading to widespread adoption of 10 GbE for server connectivity over the next few years.

Download this white paper for an overview of the factors that are driving the growth for 10 GbE in the data center.

January 11th, 2010

By Cisco Systems

Cisco IT is transforming its data centers with solutions that help to realize the company’s Data Center 3.0 vision, which employs a unified network fabric to connect servers and storage devices in a way that is resilient, scalable, and easy to manage. The transformation occurs in three stages: 1) Consolidating I/O and increasing throughput by implementing unified I/O running on 10 Gigabit Ethernet (current stage); 2) Increasing the power available to compute resources by reducing the power consumed by the network infrastructure and; 3) Making applications location-independent, which will simplify changes and possibly eliminate the need for change requests

Learn how Cisco is deploying consolidated I/O in their data center by downloading this paper.