CEO Blog

The Handwriting Is On the Wall: Storage Is Converging To Ethernet

As I visit with BLADE Network Technologies’ customers around the world, convergence to Ethernet as the storage fabric of choice is becoming the “handwriting on the wall” as iSCSI, NAS and increasingly FCoE demonstrate their various advantages.

Using a converged fabric reduces equipment and management costs by eliminating the need to use multiple adapters and switches for specific data types. This also significantly reduces the power consumption across the data center. Based on studies by The Green Grid.org, the total power used in data centers is more than 3x the power used directly by the IT equipment. Therefore every Watt saved by converging to Ethernet fabrics actually saves 3 Watts.

Many customers are already enjoying the benefits of converged Ethernet fabrics by using iSCSI and NAS for storage today. This is a rapidly growing trend in both SMB environments and in enterprise data centers. IDC has forecasted that iSCSI will take over 30% of the SAN market by 2010, and we expect this growth rate to accelerate as 10 Gigabit Ethernet becomes even more pervasive and affordable.

iSCSI has matured to eliminate earlier barriers for its use in enterprise-class environments. According to Gartner, the remaining issue is misperception. “Users who are adding new servers to an existing SAN, updating servers and/or consolidating servers using server virtualization should pursue iSCSI as a complement to Fibre Channel, and as a way of saving up to $3,500 per server,” writes Gartner’s Robert Passmore in “Significant Cost-Savings on Storage Area Network Deployments for Data Centers.” Gartner ID:G00165856

To accelerate performance beyond 4Gbps and 8Gbps Fibre Channel, 10 Gigabit Ethernet is available for iSCSI and at lower costs. Advances in 10G Ethernet server NICs have minimized the need for iSCSI to consume CPU server cycles. As a result, iSCSI handles enterprise workloads and scales to support 1,000s of servers.

iSCSI saves costs because Ethernet NICs and switches are a lot less expensive than Fibre Channel equivalents, and administration of iSCSI SAN is much less complex than with Fibre Channel. With its combination of improved performance and cost savings, iSCSI is proving itself beyond its traditional niche in SMB environments.

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is raising more and more interest as FCoE-ready products are appearing on the market. Many customers that currently use Fibre Channel storage foresee converging their data and storage fabrics using 10 Gigabit Ethernet and FCoE. They are gravitating from strong interest to active evaluation and initial deployment of converged networks as FCoE technologies mature. What’s more, to make the converged network into a reality, customers realize that 10 Gigabit Ethernet now offers the technical capabilities for FCoE combined with affordable pricing and broad availability across servers, NICs and switches.

FCoE bridges the best of both the storage and networking worlds. Users are able to keep their existing storage systems and can use Ethernet to transport information back and forth between servers and storage. The network fabric transparently changes Fibre Channel to the more common Ethernet standard. A forklift upgrade is not required for FCoE which makes users extremely comfortable.

There are clearly many benefits to fabric convergence. As customers make this transition they should consider if iSCSI, FCoE or NAS best fit their needs along with their bandwidth and high availability requirements. Ethernet is the only standard with the flexibility to meet all enterprise data center requirements with high performance, low cost and fully open standards.

Indeed, converged networks come in different flavors, but whether iSCSI, NAS or FCoE, the convergence of storage to Ethernet is the handwriting on the wall. Please see our detailed white paper on this topic: http://www.bladenetwork.net/userfiles/file/PDFs/WP_Fabric_Convergence.pdf, as well as a new blade.org, BLADE, NetApp and Double-Take Software white paper on “Storage Consolidation for Data Center Efficiency” at: http://www.bladenetwork.net/IP-SAN-Storage.html.  BLADE Network Technologies also teamed up with NetApp to develop a podcast that details the companies’ ability to deliver converged networking solutions. Hosted by Jason Blosil, product marketing manager, NetApp, and Graham Smith, director of product management, BLADE Network Technologies, the podcast is available here (title is "NetApp & BLADE, Cloud Ready Data Center Networks").