RackonomicsHolistic Rules for the New Data Center

As we have been briefing various customers and industry analysts in conjunction with the recent launch of our new top-of-rack data center-class RackSwitch, it has become clear to me that there is a tremendous amount of confusion in the marketplace. This confusion seems to stem from the relative absence of holistic best practices surrounding how data centers can harness the tremendous benefits of serve/storage consolidation and virtualization without inadvertently driving hidden costs and pitfalls into the networking facilities infrastructure. Power, for example, is a huge issue, when companies
using collocation facilities can't supply their racks with more than a small KwA per rack, so end up deploying racks that are only half or one third full.

This is why I'm so passionate about the potential for "Rackonomics" – a new set of holistic rules for the data center that BLADE is defining and championing. IT departments can leverage Rackonomics to scale out their data center networks affordably and holistically at the rack level. In modern data center architecture, Rackonomics refers to the concept of rack-level provisioning--designing, deploying and replicating server/computer systems, data networks and storage area networks (SANs) rack by rack to:

• decrease the total cost of ownership of data center infrastructures
  
• reduce IT complexity
  
• enable incremental scalability.

One of the primary tenets of Rackonomics is that putting switches into blade enclosures and server/storage racks is far more economical than using external core switches. Our customers have told us that a "put it in the rack" strategy can enable them to save tens of thousands of dollars in switch hardware, deployment and energy costs for every external switch that they can avoid deploying. And, the network switch has the ability to viritualize the network connections associated with the server/storage elements located in the rack, thus vastly simplifying the datacenter network.

What's more, every time an IT manager can make a rack-level deployment decision, they can fully understand the holistic impact of that rack on other elements of their data center infrastructure. Through Rackonomics and its rack-level approach, as requirements to grow and scale out emerge, an IT manager can understand exactly the impact of what's being added in terms of compute capacity, latency and power and cooling - without over-provisioning the expensive core network, SANs, and power and cooling capabilities to keep pace.

The fundamental concept of Rackonomics is straightforward. By linking servers/storage into localized switches that reside inside blade and/or rack enclosures, IT buyers can save money by dramatically reducing acquisition costs and eliminate network complexity by virtualizing network resources at a rack level. Operational costs can also be reduced because IT administrators are managing fewer entities (racks instead of individual elements in a rack). Furthermore, cabling costs are reduced often by as much as 80%) and cooling requirements for network equipment can be cut in half because fewer power and space hungry core switches are required.

However, as the saying goes, "the proof is in the pudding." One of the biggest benefits of Rackonomics comes from the real-world understanding of how all the elements of the rack work together in a holistic way before making the big decision to scale out using a specific rack full of components. Rackonomics offers a new set of customer-driven rules of the data center. But, how can vendors and their customers play together by those rules?

At BLADE, we're committed to overcoming confusion about how best to implement server/storage consolidation and virtualization by helping to establish shared understandings between the vendor and user communities around holistic data center best practices. Our recent demonstration in Orlando, Florida at Storage Networking World of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) with Emulex and NetApp is one such holistic example. FCoE, with its ability to converge data and storage networks, is heralded as the wave of the future, but only to the extent that vendors can communicate its viability and value and the end-user community can understand how to make it work in the real world. That is Rackonomics at work.

One final thought for the busy IT manager grappling with a myriad of issues….think of your datacenter as a collection of racks vs. individual server, storage and networking elements. Make a rack as the smallest unit of deployment in your environment and then replicate that rack. This will make deployment, management and scaling much simpler.

Resource Links:

• Virtualizing the Network Facilities (Interop 2008 Podcast I did with InfoWorld)
  
• ZDNet Blog entry on BLADE and Rackonomics from a conversation with BLADE VP of Strategy and Product Management, Dan Tuchler