CEO Focus
Data centres undergo a remarkable and exciting transformation
DCS talks to Henry Wasik, CEO at Force10 Networks, to discover how the company is helping its customers get to grips with the current buzz topics, such as convergence, virtualisation and, of course, The Cloud.
DCS: Please can you provide a little bit of background on the company’s history to date?
HW: Founded in 1999, Force10 Networks is the global technology leader that data centre, service provider and enterprise customers rely on when the network is their business. The company’s heritage is characterised by pioneering industry- first innovations and its high- performance solutions are designed to deliver new economics by virtualising and automating Ethernet networks.
Force10’s award-winning switching and routing products deliver unmatched port density and resiliency to help our customers deploy a high- availability, agile and standards-based GbE, 10 GbE and 40 GbE network fabric, while reducing power and cooling costs.
Also, Force10’s ground-breaking approach to open, standards-based automation and virtualisation allows customers to transform their network infrastructure into a self-optimising, reliable and accountable cloud computing fabric.
DCS: Do end users understand, and are they comfortable with, the idea of convergence?
HW: The concept of convergence and its benefits are clear to data centre customers: reducing the number of switches and cables, as well as reducing the management. While the idea of convergence is not new, the implementation is. We expect 2011 to be the start of this convergence trend. Vendors such as Force10 are rolling out new, innovative products to help customers converge their data and storage networks.
DCS: And is such convergence desirable, or are there some potential drawbacks?
HW: Force10 is certainly finding customers are interested in convergence and understand its benefits. However, they are not rushing to re-architect their networks right away. Combining data and storage networks brings additional complexity that must be addressed. Force10 is helping customers address this additional complexity with new, innovative technologies that make it
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easier for customers to exploit the benefits of convergence.
DCS: Enhanced Ethernet – lowest common denominator technology or the right technology winning out?
HW: The combination of lossless Ethernet standards, new standards that allow fibre channel storage packets to be transported over IP networks and the economics of Ethernet make enhanced Ethernet the right solution. History tells us Ethernet prices will continue to fall. As 10GbE and 40GbE shipments increase, the cost per port will fall, making Ethernet more cost effective than Fibre Channel. This is not a question of if, but rather when. Beyond pricing, new standards such as FCoE and DCB (data centre bridging) allow fibre channel storage packets to be supported on IP networks with the additional features required to make Ethernet lossless, which is one of the main reasons Ethernet had not been used for storage networks in the past. With these enhancements, Ethernet is being transformed to meet the needs of convergence.
February/March 2011
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