Data Center Dynamics

The explosion of business services and applications is driving data center complexity and costs. This trend requires a data center infrastructure that quickly responds to dynamic workloads while reducing expenses and energy consumption. Several new technologies such as server virtualization, storage virtualization and blade servers have been introduced to optimize the operations of data centers. These efficiency improvements, however, are limited by the existing I/O infrastructure. Although the I/O adapters' performance, complexity, capabilities and cost have grown, the I/O infrastructure deployment model has not changed, remains complex and hinders data center agility. Each server typically still contains several dedicated internal I/O adapters (1 and 10 Gbps Ethernet NICs, Fibre Channel HBAs, SAS/SATA RAID, graphics, etc), which on average are utilized at less than 15% of their available I/O bandwidth and capability. In addition, each server still connects to network and storage aggregation switches using multiple network and storage cables per server before reaching the corporate networks. This I/O deployment model wastes power, increases cooling requirements and makes the I/O infrastructure inflexible, expensive and costly to manage and maintain.