A recent white paper entitled Top 5 Questions to Ask About your 10GbE Data Center is now available from Juniper Networks. Authored by ITG, the technology brief asserts that the data center has historically been the focal point of technology evolution. "Over the past decade, application architectures, servers, and storage have all changed the way services are provisioned and delivered," notes the brief's executive summary. "However, the foundation of the data center -- the network itself -- has not seen the same level of change."
"The data center network needs to evolve from the rigid, inflexible, architecture of the past to a more agile and dynamic solution to meet today’s customer requirements," contends the document. "At the most basic level, this starts with the 10GbE network at the server access layer."
The analysis adds that, in the data center, 10GbE top-of-rack switches are currently seeing their biggest growth, while noting that, in the second quarter of 2012, the number of 10GbE ports sold was nearly 3.4 million, with a growth rate of 13% quarter over quarter. The research finds a number of factors responsible for this growth. "Beginning with increasingly powerful multicore compute systems, followed by the rapid adoption of server virtualization, and continuing with virtualization at the I/O layer (e.g., converged storage), the network is the glue that holds this all together," continues the executive summary. "Bandwidth becomes a premium, and so does manageability of the entire network."
Chuck Girt, vice president of engineering and operations for OneCommunity, a broadband provider in Northeast Ohio quoted in the white paper, says that his company faces these requirements on a daily basis. “As customers demand more bandwidth and more horsepower, we can meet those needs without having to forklift anything,” explains Girt. “We just keep adding to the system.”
Access the white paper at Juniper Networks.