europe SNIA
www.snia-europe.org
Ethernet: the basis for consolidated networks
By Denise Ridolfo, SNIA Europe Board of Directors, NetApp
Over the past fifteen years, the Internet has become the operations fabric for all organizations, and every enterprise has realized that a robust Ethernet infrastructure is a competitive requirement in business today. Every enterprise has invested in Ethernet networking expertise. So, what makes Ethernet a suitable storage interconnect?
Ethernet is a robust and mature network technology that is very cost effective £ It supports multiple storage protocols (NFS, CIFS/SMB, iSCSI, FCoE) £ It is pervasive and in almost every compute device, so attaching to storage from any location is feasible
£ It scales to 10Gb today, and up to 40Gb and 100Gb in the near future
£ It is a shared network technology that offers the ability to reduce costs further by sharing bandwidth with other network traffic, including storage
£ It offers VLANs, to logically isolate network traffic £ It offers routing for longer distance resource access
Recent numbers from IDC Worldwide Storage Systems Tracker for 2010 says that Ethernet Storage (NAS plus iSCSI) grew to 51% of the networked storage capacity shipped in 2010, and the FC SAN networked storage revenue share slipped to 55% (from 62% in 2009 and 67% in 2008). Given a continuation of the more rapid growth rate of Ethernet Storage, and the transition to virtual server environments it makes perfect sense that Ethernet storage will soon become the revenue market share leader.
Ethernet storage is already the dominant storage networking technology for LAN servers because of its simplicity, flexibility and price/performance advantages
4
www.dcseurope.info I October/November 2011
it delivers. Fibre Channel is still the most broadly deployed network storage solution in tier 1 and tier 2 data centers. However, we may be close to an inflexion point.
FCoE is a relatively new protocol that enables Fibre Channel to be transmitted natively over lossless Ethernet. It is designed to maintain backward compatibility with existing Fibre Channel endpoint infrastructure, and targets data centers wishing to transition to a “converged” (10 Gigabit) Ethernet network infrastructure, instead of separate storage and data communications networks. Each of the existing Ethernet storage technologies (NFS, CIFS/SMB, iSCSI and FCoE) are experiencing continued development activity and feature advancement. Today’s virtual server environments are prototypes of tomorrow’s cloud environments. Most analysts agree that virtual server penetration is less than 50% today. As that heads towards 100%, this will drive the further adoption of Ethernet storage. NFS took a major step forward with the release of NFSv4.1 in 2010, which includes parallel NFS (pNFS) that enables the distribution of data across storage clusters, eliminates or reduces load and capacity balancing, and accelerates I/O. pNFS and scale-out storage environments are expected to reach the market over the next 12-18 months, further expanding the market.
For Ethernet, the “Data Center Bridging” enhancements are complete. 40Gb speeds are starting to show up in switch products, and 100Gb is only months behind. We are also starting to see new potential standards that support large- scale virtual server and cloud environments.
So much to learn, so little time – what are your Ethernet plans for the future? You can check out what SNIA’s Ethernet Storage Forum has to say on this subject by visiting
www.snia-europe.org
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44