Unifying storage and networking to create next-generation data centers

At present, the new generation of data centers has become the focus of the market and an important step towards cloud computing. The trend is to build a dynamic data center, but today's data centers face performance, cost, and scalability bottlenecks in storage and networking. To break the storage bottleneck, an open, unified storage network architecture is essential.

For dynamic data centers, the next-generation unified storage needs to have a scalable and converged architecture, such as clustered parallel storage; using industry-standard components to achieve cost reductions from economies of scale. At the same time, the network is unified to 10 Gigabit Ethernet and FCoE, and IP and fiber protocols are supported, reducing network cost and complexity. In addition, high-performance, low-power, and smaller solid-state storage are used on storage media, and advanced storage services can be implemented at the same time.

When it comes to a unified platform architecture, servers, storage, and networks are independent of each other in traditional thinking. However, with the continuous increase of applications and data, the trend of cloud computing continues to evolve. What users need is that a data center can be used as a unified platform to consider storage and network issues from the perspective of improving the efficiency of the entire data center.

Opportunities Brought by Next-Generation Data Centers Nowadays, as more and more manufacturers join the cloud computing, constantly improving technologies and products can help enterprise users transform their traditional data centers. From the private cloud within the enterprise to the external public cloud, the roles played by the storage and network platforms can not be ignored. Through technological innovation, organic integration of servers, storage, and networks can be achieved, providing support for the construction of private and public clouds. It is the significance of a new generation of data center construction.

The next-generation data center management strategy will unify the various architecture platforms, and the independent work of servers, storage, and network branches will be effectively improved. A new generation of data center integration architecture, that is, the integration of the entire infrastructure consisting of servers, networks, and storage systems, allows each system to give full play to its biggest advantages. To manage a new generation of data centers, it must be able to fully consider the data center. All the elements and the relationships between the elements make the storage, the network, and the server need to be changed in order to meet the requirements of future cloud computing applications.

As a chip manufacturer, Intel not only plays a very important role in the process of server performance, but also continues to innovate in a new generation of data centers. Since 2008, the company has increased its investment in the storage sector. By 2009, Intel began to integrate server, storage, and network services, and the original server platform division has also been upgraded to the current data center division. Under the open, unified data center architecture, Intel further integrated related technologies such as servers, chips, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE, and solid-state storage (SSD) to gather power for a new generation of data centers.

The key issues of data center and converged storage and network The convergence of next-generation data centers is the integration and interoperability of networks and storage. At present, many companies still rely heavily on Ethernet for their internal communications networks, and the major communication protocols for storage networks are still fiber optics (FCs), as 10Gb Ethernet is gradually approaching, Ethernet-based fiber-optic communications technology (FCoE) and new The lossless 10Gb Ethernet technology has begun to become popular in the data center, and the foundation of future data center network convergence will be built on the 10Gb Ethernet architecture.

It is based on such network requirements that the unified network architecture has become a key part of the next-generation data center. On the basis of supporting EDC standards, Intel provides support for FCoE, an Ethernet-based fiber protocol. It also integrates storage networks and enterprise LANs simply and effectively through FCoE. The biggest problem in the data center is I/O. When multiple applications are integrated on one server, the bandwidth of the standard network ports cannot be satisfactorily met, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet can better solve the network. Transmission problems not only satisfy IO bandwidth, but also provide unified and simplified management.

On the computing device side, all servers, storage, and application resources in the data center are highly aggregated and interoperable, and efficient management and flexible allocation are achieved based on the user's access requirements. The data center built based on open architecture can well solve equipment interoperability, data migration, resource integration and flexible deployment to solve this cross-platform and data center architecture issues.

As Intel has described as an open data center, it emphasizes building a data center by developing and applying products, technologies, and solutions based on open, standardized architectures. Through constant innovation, many server and storage network vendors in the industry have simplified the data center architecture and made management more efficient.

As a result, with the open data center concept and the ever-evolving core products of the storage network, the development of data centers in the cloud computing era will be even more rapid. The concept of an open data center will more easily integrate technologies such as storage and networking, and make next-generation data centers suitable for cloud computing based on an open architecture.