Storage Networking: On the Cusp of Major Change

Whether you call it storage consolidation, storage unification or building the storage network fabric, the concept is all the same: to do away with the multiple network architectures and protocols that bedevil most IT managers in favor of a simple, elegant infrastructure.

To many, that means building the network on top of the one that already serves as the framework for application data -- the Ethernet. But even that simple approach is fraught with many dangers, as it has proven rather difficult to establish an architecture that is both flexible enough to accommodate the increasingly disparate nature of enterprise data, yet robust enough that it can tie into legacy networks without diminishing the performance levels that users have grown accustomed to.

At the moment, there are two main protocols battling it out for the role as primary enterprise fabric. Most observers expect Ethernet to be the most popular, due to its low cost and widespread usage at mainstream data centers. InfiniBand, on the other hand, has a reputation as a robust but expensive interconnect solution in high-performance environments, and has the advantage of a 20 Gbps solution already available, compared to Ethernet's 10 Gbps.

InfiniBand suppliers are quick to point out that when you get right down to it, their solution can easily accommodate all of the requirements of a unified fabric, at a price point that is very competitive to 10 GbE. It's also available right now.

"You have to remember that 10 GbE still has yet to come about in mass deployment," said Brian Sparks, director of marketing communications at Mellanox. "A common theme among experts is that we're not expecting to see 10 GbE ports ship in great numbers until 2010 to 2011. We’re already shipping 10 G InfiniBand at $125 per port, end-user pricing. You can't really find that with Ethernet at all. And people are using that in high-end workstations where you don’t need the best performance or best latency."

For a large portion of the enterprise community, however, the primary goal of consolidation is to bridge the divide between their IP and Fibre Channel silos, primarily through the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard. Not only will this further leverage the already hefty investment in Fibre Channel infrastructure, it empowers users with multiple levels of storage functionality to suit various data requirements. But while logic would dictate that this would introduce a range of management and integration issues, word so far is that deployments are going fairly smoothly.

"The impact to IT should be minimal from a deployment and integration perspective," says Shaun Walsh, vice president of corporate marketing at Emulex. "One of our early beta testing customers said installing FCoE was a non-event. (But) the second major integration point will be with virtualization. As IT managers aggregate many virtual machines onto a single server, they will need intelligent I/O bandwidth that can support dynamic provisioning, resource allocation, VM mobility and application optimization at the individual VM level."

The industry also seems to be consolidating around an interoperable standard known as Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) that should provide for a more open storage networking universe than enterprises have known in the past. The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) has been holding regular "Plugfests" at the University of New Hampshire's Interoperability Laboratory aimed at forging full interoperability between Fibre Channel and Ethernet technologies.

"Adding Converged Enhanced Ethernet capable switches to the Plugfest (has) allowed vendors to validate discovery over an FCoE fabric, priority flow control, separation of Ethernet traffic based on priority and interoperability with other Ethernet traffic in the same environment," says Skip Jones, chairman of the FCIA. "This added testing has allowed the industry to move forward toward a quick implementation of an interoperable converged network environment."

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