Blog Posts From The Data Stack Tagged With data_center

Server Storage Caching Considerations

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:00:16 GMT

Caching is storage. Here’s how Wikipedia defines caching:

“… .a cache (pron.: /ˈ k æ ʃ / KASH) is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster.”

With the data explosion and consumers creating content and wanting to access it immediately, caching is becoming more and more important.

My colleague, Susan Bobholz is a Marketing Director in Intel’s Data Center Software Division and talks about the considerations for server storage caching.

Right now, one of the hottest storage topics is storage caching. It seems hardly a week goes by without some type of caching software showing up in the press. I thought I’d spend a bit of time talking about this trend and provide some things to think about when choosing caching software.

In many datacenters, the hottest, most frequently accessed data is stored on 15K serial attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives. But those hard drives can become a bottleneck because they are mechanical devices with moving parts. They simply can’t move fastest enough to keep up with some application demands. One solution to resolve this is to replace all those 15K SAS hard drives with Solid State Drives (SSDs) but this can be an expensive undertaking. The beauty of storage caching is that it protects your investment in hard drives, because your application performance is improved without replacing all those hard drives with SSDs.

To be as simple as possible, storage caching allows the hottest, most important data to be stored in a SSD instead of hard drives, allowing that data to be accessed significantly faster. Often caching is implemented as a server application, but sometimes it’s actually part of the firmware on a RAID HBA

So you’ve decided you want to implement storage caching. There are several caching options out there. Other than cost, what are some key questions to consider about when deciding which to use?

Where does your cache physically reside?

As mentioned above, some caching solutions are integrated into a RAID HBA. This means that the Cache SSD must be attached to the RAID HBA itself and only data on hard drives connected to that RAID HBA can be accelerated.

Other caching solutions allow the Cache SSD to be anywhere inside the server itself. This provides additional flexibility as the data being cached can be anywhere on the server - behind a RAID HBA, behind a SAS HBA or even attached to the chipset SATA ports.

In addition to being able to have the Cache SSD inside the server, some caching solutions allow the Cache SSD to be outside the server, in a SAN or NAS. This is important in virtualized servers as this allows virtual machine migration to occur automatically. The cache remains active while the virtual machine moves from host to host.

Consider where you want the cache SSD to connect to your server when choosing a caching solution.

Which OSes are supported?

Think about what OSes exist in your datacenter. Windows? Linux? Virtualized OSes such as VMware ESX or Xen? Think about whether it’s important to have a common caching solution from one vendor across all these environments. Not all caching solutions support all these OSes.

Being able to choose what goes into the cache

This may sound unimportant, but imagine having an SLA with a customer that requires you to deliver the lowest latency to the data associated with that application. What if you could guarantee that specific data was always in the cache, ready to be accessed? Several caching solutions available today offer proprietary ways to pin data into the cache. This is becoming so important that standards bodies such as ANSI T10 are looking into ways to standardize ways to determine whether data should be kept into a cache at all times.

Read caching or write caching?

Look at the applications you want to accelerate. Do they mostly read data from hard drives or do they mostly write data? Or is it a mix? Some caching solutions are better are accelerate reads, others are better at writes. Choose a caching solution that meets the needs of the applications you want to accelerate.

Caching algorithms aren’t all the same

We all learned about Least Recently Used caching in school. Just as the name implies when the cache is full but new data needs to be added to the cache, the data that has been sitting in the cache the longest without being use will be evicted to make room for the new data. This can be an effective algorithm and is very common. But some caching solutions add intelligence to the caching algorithm and are able to decide to keep specific most popular/active data in the cache longer, protecting it from being evicted by more recent, but less popular data. This reduces the probability that important data is evicted from the cache, improving overall application performance.

So, these are just some of the areas to consider when choosing a storage caching solution. What is important to you when you choose a caching solution? Let me know!

Full disclosure: Intel has its own caching solution: Intel® Cache Acceleration Software that works with Intel® Datacenter SSDs. We think it’s pretty cool. A 30 day trial is available on intel.com.

Susan Bobholz is a Marketing Director in Intel’s Datacenter Software Division. She’s been with Intel for 20 years, doing everything from software development to initiative management to product marketing, focused on storage technologies and products. Prior to joining Intel, Susan developed software at Siemens Medical Labs and firmware for Motorola cell phones. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She holds 3 patents.

Big Data and its Role in Driving Technology Trends – Intel’s Data Center CTO and Senior Fellow Steve Pawlowski Shares His Insights

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:29:52 GMT

How big is big data? Imagine a petabyte of data…which in video form represents about 10 years of HD viewing. Scientists, corporations and people are producing petabytes of data an amazing rate….an average Chinese city’s traffic cameras produce a petabyte every 12 hours or so, and the CERN supercollider produces a petabyte per second. These massive stores of data represent an enormous opportunity for analytics, but in order to scale technology to process data this size and scale represents an enormous technology challenge for the industry.

This is probably why Intel Senior Fellow Steve Pawlowski’s session at the Intel Developer Forum was a standing room only affair. While everyone talks big data today, no one has the complete map to where we need to go to fully unlock the benefits of big data. Steve broke this problem down with a focus on data center innovation, compute and storage innovation, data protection and context and location as areas for industry innovation focus to harness the full value of big data.

In order to scale data center capability, the efficiency of data generation and compute at a data center level need to be addressed.

Steve discussed Rack Scale Architecture as well as data center level innovations including ambient cooling, DC power, optimized PUE to help address this challenge. He also pointed to better management of infrastructure power instrumentation with technologies like Intel Data Center Manager as being focuses of Intel as driving the power dynamics across the data center. He then drilled into system efficiency discussing platform technologies including improved fan speeds, high efficiency power supplies and voltage regulators, and liquid cooling as technologies to improve server level efficiency, and processor advancements can push this efficiency further.

Steve then changed focus to discuss the importance of efficient scaling of memory capacity for big data. While today’s systems scale memory through increased DRAM, this scaling is expensive both from a cost and a power consumption perspective. Steve pointed to new memory technologies on the horizon that would introduce the performance capabilities of DRAM with power and cost dynamics of NAND memory as being an emerging alternative for the data center.

With a path defined towards memory innovation, Steve then moved on to the I/O and interconnect innovation required to move all of this data from data collection to data analysis. His first topic in this field was the breakthrough represented by silicon photonics, a new capability invented by Intel to use silicon lasers to dramatically reduce the cost of optical transmissions. He then discussed the growing challenge in wireless communication with an emerging spectrum shortage stating that by 2020 we will only be able to meet 50% of the demand for spectrum usage. Steve pointed to delivery of software defined radios, devices that could identify available spectrum and modulate point to point communications to available spectrum on demand as a potential solution to our spectrum challenge, but admitted that regulatory control of spectrum must be addressed as well to put this solution into practice.

Steve followed his focus on moving data to the challenge of security discussing ensuring data integrity within the data center and as data is in flight. While current solutions try to keep pace with today’s environments, the news is rife with stories of data exposure often for nefarious purposes. The industry needs to do more to ensure data integrity, and Steve called for a holistic approach that focuses on defending against firmware attacks, protecting privacy and data security, ensuring application security, and overcoming programming errors and developing applications for failure.

Finally, Steve focused on the analytics frameworks themselves highlighting the early progress of Hadoop and pointing to the need for the industry to develop many algorithms for analytics. While the parallel batch work of frameworks like Hadoop will get us started, some of the most compelling uses of big data such as genomics or social searching involve graph approaches. Steve provided an example of investment by Intel’s research team in development of genomics algorithms speeding results 10X and stated that in the future compute will be driven by the requirements of these algorithms vs. forcing algorithm development towards a static compute platform.

A New Era of Insight: Diane Bryant Outlines the Future of the Data Center and Beyond

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:44:19 GMT

One thing we all know about the Intel Developer Forum is that it provides an insight into the future of computing, and Diane Bryant did not disappoint providing the audience with a view into how data center computing is evolving to address the vast needs of our changing society and the rapid pace in which we are using technology to drive our businesses, manage our cities and keep us connected. Diane began her speech by outlining some of these macro changes in China: growing urbanization, rapid ramp of citizens with access to computing platforms, and technologies aimed at solving major challenges such as the rapid growth in urban traffic. Data centers play a critical role in delivering this seemless compute experience, and Diane described how behind each device from sensor to tablet to smart display, rests a server. It’s a simple concept but one that quickly emerges as a driver of the rapid growth in data center compute capability the world is experiencing when you consider our ramp towards 3 billion connected individuals and 10+ billion connected devices across the globe.

Diane outlined Intel’s approach to helping deliver the foundation for the underlying infrastructure to power the data center in a number of ways. The first focus was analytics. With Intel’s recent foray into the Hadoop distribution arena, Intel’s footprint in how unstructured data from sources such as social media streams has expanded from hardware to software and solution delivery. This was apparent in the end to end traffic management solution described by a leading Chinese manufacturer, Bocom, whose partnership with Intel has shifted the company from image capture to 2.6 Petabytes of data capture and real time analysis using Intel powered analytics from the edge to back end data center. The power of Intel’s Hadoop distribution was also demonstrated by Intel’s own Jason Waxman as he showed the power of infrastructure innovation at the processor, drive, and network matched with code optimization delivering a 30X improvement in response time vs. previously available solutions. More about the Hadoop distribution from Intel here.

Diane then branched into the land of the high density data center discussing the latest from Intel in rack scale architecture delivery as well as progress on microserver platform innovation with a world’s first demo of our next generation Avoton platform and announcement of availability of our first Atom based storage solutions only 4 months after the delivery of our first Atom based microserver platforms. To discuss the importance of this area of innovation, Diane welcomed the chair of China’s Project Scorpio to the stage. Project Scorpio is driving large scale data center design innovation and is an effort spearheaded by China Internet behemoths Tencent, Baidu, AliBaba and China Telecom. When you consider that over 550 million people in China access the net daily, the work by groups like Project Scorpio will help drive innovation in the data center on a massive scale. To help deliver the capability of the cloud to Chinese customers, Diane announced a new China Cloud Lab to be hosted in Beijing helping optimize cloud solutions on Intel Architecture. More info about rack scale architecture and Avoton here. (link to Raejeanne episode we just did)

Diane concluded with an update on data center platforms highlighting that 2013 will bring new solutions across the platform lineup. For E7 she announced the new Intel Run Sure technology and highlight how new innovations in IO and memory will help drive new capabilities for big data and in memory database solutions. In E3 she discussed the improvements in graphics capabilities which will help a wide array of applications such as described in Bocom’s traffic monitoring solution. She summed it up stating that for every workload that data center customers face, Intel is expanding its large technology portfolio to deliver the world’s best solutions optimized to address customer requirements. And really, with its heritage in working with the industry to deliver the best computing experiences on the planet, what else would you expect from Intel?

Two generations of Intel Atom SoC to power HP’s Moonshot servers in 2013

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:25:42 GMT

Intel Atom S1200 helps HP Moonshot to lift off today.

HP and Intel® have been collaborating for a few years on project Moonshot to bring new levels of density, efficiency and TCO for light weight web workloads such as static web and dedicated hosting. Yesterday, HP unveiled their first generation Moonshot systems and I am excited to see that the first and only production HP ProLiant Moonshot servers available today are based on the Intel® Atom® S1200 processor family.

HP chose to lead with the Intel Atom™ processor for many reasons. First, HP and Intel have a long history of collaboration and we have brought many innovations to market first on Intel and HP’s platforms. Second, the Intel Atom S1200 processor is the industry’s only available 64-bit SoC with critical data center class features such as full 64-bit software ecosystem support, ECC and Intel Virtualization Technology - all within an ultra-low power 6W TDP. This means that today the ProLiant Moonshot servers using Atom S1200 can drop into any environment and software applications will run seamlessly on the server without porting needed. The lower power you want, with the software applications you need. Third, this SoC was designed for targeted lightweight web scale workloads, including low-end dedicated hosting, simple content delivery, and offline batch analytics making Intel Atom S1200 the perfect SoC solution for HP Moonshot’s target markets.

Moonshot servers with the Intel Atom S1200 are shipping to customers today and receiving great reviews. We look forward to sharing more results from customers going forward as these implementations go public. We also look forward to seeing Moonshot systems that will take advantage of higher density HP ProLiant Moonshot servers using Intel’s next generation Atom SoC coming later this year. The next gen servers will be built on Intel’s 2nd generation 64-bit Intel Atom SoC, code named “Avoton”. Avoton is built on Intel’s leading 3D tri-gate 22-nanometer (nm) process technology and is based on a new microarchitecture codenamed “Silvermont”. It will feature an integrated Ethernet fabric controller and deliver improvements over today’s Intel Atom S1200 in performance per watt and energy efficiency through a combination of new capabilities, new microarchitecture and leadership manufacturing technology. Avoton is now being sampled to customers and the first systems are expected to be available in second half of 2013. Moonshot servers using Avoton will quadruple the density (4 Avoton SoCs per server) vs. the current generation just announced using Intel Atom S1200.

Want to see these two fabulous energy sipping SoCs? Here you go. Avoton is on my right, the Intel Atom S1200 on my left.

2013 is and will be a great year for Intel and HP Moonshot. We have not only enabled the first Moonshot system to lift-off but with Avoton we will also bring HP Moonshot’s customers a revolution in energy efficiency and performance per watt to drive major TCO improvements when processing lightweight web scale workloads. For more information on this announcement and the future of Intel’s microserver products, please visit www.intel.com/microserver or contact me on twitter with more questions - @RaejeanneS.

Data centers: What does it take to heat things up?

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:00:25 GMT

This post originally appeared in GreenBiz on December 26, 2012

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Keeping things cool has long been a mantra for data center operators, but new research suggests it may not be essential for everyone.

Data centers have historically operated at temperatures ranging between 64° and 68° Fahrenheit (or 17° to 20° Celsius), prompting them to spend approximately 44 percent of their total power budgets on cooling.

Originally, the varied mix of equipment and associated warranties dictated these relativelycool temperatures, and service level agreements (SLAs) often included explicit language about how much deviation was acceptable.

But while it's true temperature control can affect equipment reliability and appropriatemanagement and monitoring is needed for business continuity, new research supports the idea that higher temperatures are beneficial for most data centers.

So, how do you know when to raise the temperature, and by how much? Are there any changes recommended to reduce business risks?

Should every data center cut back on cooling?

When we ask, many data center managers can’t tell us why they set the thermostat at a particular temperature. It’s just the way it has been done for years.

But when well-known companies -- including Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Korea Telecom andothers -- publicize their high temperature ambient (HTA) successes at 80°F and above, we all pay attention. And when research and on-the-ground examples support the efficacy of HTA data centers, suddenly we are all tempted to reduce our cooling costs by just pushing up the thermostat.

Before arbitrarily cutting back on cooling and letting the ambient temperature rise, however, as a data center manager, you’ll want to review your equipment warranties, SLAs and compliance requirements. For those responsible for data centers supporting legacy systems that require lower operating temperatures, or for those whose organizations are subject to extremely stringent compliance requirements, you’ll want to continue to take a very conservative approach.

HTA Best Practices

That said, today’s major vendors of data center equipment generally design and warrant systems and products for reliable operation at 40°C or 100°F. It makes economical sense to take advantage of the latest product specifications and warranties. This means considering simple as well as more involved changes:

Thermostat-only changes. Data centers potentially reduce cooling costs by 4 percent for every 1°C increase in operating temperature. (Cooling accounts for up to 44 percent of the power consumed in an un-optimized data center, which is the typical design being implemented in emerging economies.)
Retrofitting the data center. Besides raising ambient temperature, hot and cold air aisle separation drives up the savings, and replacing chillers with economizers (heat exchangers) can yield dramatic savings. In one of Intel’s data centers (with 900 production servers), retrofitting and raising the temperature to 33°C or 91.4°F has translated to a 67 percent annual power savings ($2.87 million in a 10MW data center).
Optimized data centers. Hot aisle containment, energy-efficient servers and a node-level power management solution capable of dynamic resource management (e.g., power capping servers, racks and rows; adjusting server performance and fan speeds) have been shown to dramatically drive up energy efficiency and support operation at the highest temperatures without increasing risk to the business. Real-world results show power utilization efficiencies can be increased so that IT power utilization improves from 50 percent to 81 percent of the total.

All things -- and temperatures -- in moderation

Your data center can take some steps to reap the cost benefits of HTA operation. Start with a plan to phase out, relocate or outsource any legacy system that is keeping your data center at the lower, more expensive operating temperatures. As soon as possible, bump up the temperature by one degree or two, to get on a path toward HTA.

However far along you are, an energy management solution may improve your visibility into energy use and thermal patterns within your data center. Among the foundations necessary for achieving power efficiency through HTA practices are real-time visibility and the abilities to log power and temperature data, and to analyze usage trends based on the logged data.

These same capabilities can also enable other energy management practices such as lowering carbon emissions, thus allowing you to expand a data center without exceeding power limits, and efficiently balancing services and workloads to avoid power spikes.

The cost and power savings achievable by adopting HTA as a model may well represent the new norm. The timing is perfect: Data centers currently consume 1.5 percent of all of the world’s power. Annual server energy costs exceed $27 billion. By 2014, these numbers are expected to double. Bumping up your data center’s ambient temperature directly reduces cooling costs and power consumption, and simultaneously reduces CO₂ emissions.

HTA makes business sense, and it makes sense for our planet. Get ready for the data center world to heat up!

Jeff Klaus is the director of Intel Data Center manager (DCM). Jeff leads a global team that designs, builds, sells, and supports Intel® DCM.

The Growing Energy Demands Of Living Your Life In The Cloud

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:00:06 GMT

This post originally appeared in Forbes on October 22nd, 2012

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You recycle, drive a hybrid, and run your major appliances during off-peak hours. You are doing all you can to help reduce your energy consumption, right? Maybe not.

Have you considered how your lifestyle is driving up power use in the cloud? Personal energy use is no longer reflected solely in utility bills. A rapidly growing fraction of the average person’s day now involves an online component, and what we’ve come to think of as personally essential apps and services are driving up the power requirements for a global network of Web portals and online information hosting and delivery services.

Think about how different our at-home lives were before the digital revolution. An alarm clock – not a smart phone – buzzed us awake. We read newspapers and watched over-the-air broadcast television. We went to the shopping mall, and called the airlines to book travel. Our calendars hung on the wall next to the phone, and Post-It notes, time-manager notebooks, and PDAs were our essential life tools.

Click on the present day. Dad turns on the television to play back a pre-recorded game. He checks his fantasy football stats on his smart phone while Mom uses her iPad to Facebook a relative on the other side of the country. The kids are Googling to research homework assignments, and dinner is courtesy of the family’s favorite recipe app. After dinner, e-mail is checked, and IMs go out to coworkers about tomorrow’s meeting agenda. One teenager is in a virtual multiplayer online game world with a few schoolmates, and another is streaming a favorite show from an entertainment site.

The point is that we are living in a connected world, and we are tapping into cloud-based services more than ever before. And unless you are a technology holdout, you now live in an Internet-centric world where you use multiple smart devices and enjoy instant access to information. And besides the obvious accesses to online resources, there are a growing number of cloud accesses that might surprise you. When you talk to Siri on your iPhone, for example, you are using the extensive data centers behind the voice recognition system. Similarly, your navigation and location-based services are tied to cloud services hosted on servers around the globe.

Connectivity and online services are much more than just conveniences or entertainment sources. Besides serving up music, movies and information about our favorite sports or entertainment stars, the online world has improved the delivery of services that are vital to our everyday lives. Community police departments send out automated alerts from their central data centers. Patient health information is managed within online health services to help hospitals and treatment centers improve medical outcomes. And emergency response teams and relief agencies post essential information on their web sites, to update residents hit by natural disasters like hurricane Sandy.

So, we not only enjoy convenient access to information and services, we have become dependent on it. Digital experiences are improving the quality of our lives. And that brings us back to the question of energy. What price are we all going to pay for these conveniences and safety services if cloud applications keep escalating energy consumption?

Each online activity has an energy price tag in the cloud. Behind every online experience are global networks and data centers. It is currently estimated that data centers account for consumption of at least 1.5 percent of all of the world’s available energy . This statistic should raise our concern, and in fact, this power draw has doubled in the last five years and continues to grow about 20 percent annually in part because of the growing popularity and variety of online apps and services.

Just how popular are online services? How fast is the cloud driving up energy consumption? The most popular sites and services are publicizing amazing growth in their user bases and site activity. Amazon reports that it now sells more e-books than hard copies. Tablet sales expanded 98 percent last year; there are now more than 1 million online apps. A growing number of subscribers are cancelling traditional TV services, as online video streaming increases. And the user bases for music and video streaming should reach the one billion mark within the next three to five years along with total mobile devices projected to reach eight billion by 2016 .

The digital world is here to stay, and somehow the data centers are going to have to keep up. Fortunately, the power challenge is not new to technology providers who have experienced the result of higher consumption and grid utilization. High demand and aging delivery grids have forced some utility companies to restrict the amount of power delivered to a data center. Other data center operators are seeing energy prices increase and/or spike as demand grows, which strains operational budgets. Recognizing that these trends are here to stay, IT equipment manufacturers are innovating a new generation of data center, software tools, and networking products that are more energy-efficient than predecessors.

A data center full of energy-efficient servers can still waste power, however, if these servers are always powered up, but under-utilized. Power efficiency and optimization calls for an intelligent combination of the automated monitoring of power conditions and the ability to adjust power, temperatures, computer performance and workloads on the fly.

The trends and industry needs mentioned above are driving the evolution of holistic data center power management solutions. The approaches and implementations vary, but industry leaders that are emerging, and documented user results are helping to advance the most promising methodologies and products for data center energy efficiencies.

With the potential for rapid returns on investments, the world’s largest data centers are leading a wave of energy management best practices adoption. They are curbing run-away energy with a combination of micro-level controls (for individual servers, power distribution units, air-flow controllers, and cooling units) as well as macro-level controls and policies (for racks of servers, rows of racks, and entire data centers).

While you might say that technology got us into this situation, it is equally true that technology is helping us to mitigate this energy challenge. As long as energy is a precious resource, data center managers will continue looking for ways to improve conservation. The business case encourages them to do the right thing.

So go ahead and immerse yourself in the digital world. Guilt free. Thanks to data center managers who are seeking improved energy efficiency on your behalf, your power usage in the cloud is being managed responsibly.

Jeff Klaus is the director of Intel Data Center manager (DCM). Jeff leads a global team that designs, builds, sells, and supports Intel® DCM.

Building on Success: Cisco and Intel Expand Partnership to Big Data

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:36:55 GMT

This is a guest post from Cisco.com - It originally appeared on the Data Center Blog.

Raghunath Nambiar is a Data Center Solutions Strategist for Unified Computing Systems at Cisco Systems. His current responsibilities include emerging technologies and big data strategy. He has 18 years of technical accomplishments with significant expertise in system architecture and performance engineering.

This has been an exciting week. Further expanding its Big Data portfolio, Cisco has announced collaboration with Intel, its long term partner, for the next generation of open platform for data management and analytics. The joint solution combines Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop Software with Cisco’s Common Platform Architecture (CPA) to deliver performance, capacity, and security for enterprise-class Hadoop deployments.

As described in my blog posting, the Cisco CPA is highly scalable architecture designed to meet variety of scale-out application demands that includes compute, storage, connectivity and unified management, already being deployed in a range of industries including finance, retail, service provider, content management and government. Unique to this architecture is the seamless data integration and management integration capabilities between big data applications and enterprise applications such as Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP and others, as shown below:

The current version of the Cisco CPA offers two options depending on use case: Performance optimized -- offers balanced compute power with I/O bandwidth optimized for price/performance, and Capacity optimized – for low cost per terabyte. The Intel® Distribution is supported for both performance optimized and capacity optimized options, and is available in single rack and multiple rack scale. See the Solution Brief.

The Intel® Distribution is a controlled distribution based on the Apache Hadoop, with feature enhancements, performance optimizations, and security options that are responsible for the solution’s enterprise quality. The combination of the Intel® Distribution and Cisco UCS joins the power of big data with a dependable deployment model that can be implemented rapidly and scaled to meet performance and capacity of demanding workloads. Enterprise-class services from Cisco and Intel can help with design, deployment, and testing, and organizations can continue to rely on these services through controlled and supported releases.

If you are at the O’Reilly Strata Conference 2013, please stop by the Intel booth for a live demo.

A Rainbow of Choices to Meet Enterprise Demands: Dylan Larson on New Data Center Solutions

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 13:50:07 GMT

We have been talking about data center segmentation for a number of years and are far from the days of Henry Ford-like "as long as it's black" solution delivery. However, the last few months have been notable at Intel for the addition to the Xeon Phi co-processor and Atom S processor product lines augmenting an already robust product offering portfolio. While Phi and Atom solutions meet vastly different market segments, they have one thing in common - delivery of unique solutions that meet emerging needs that a Xeon processor based solution cannot achieve with the same effectiveness. In order to get to the bottom of Intel's new data center solution segmentation, I had a great chat with Dylan Larson, Director of Xeon Marketing in Intel's Data Center and Connected Systems Group. Dylan provided some interesting insight into why Intel has decided to expand its data center solutions portfolio and lent some examples of customer demands driving these new needs. I hope you find this interview as interesting as I find all my talks with Dylan.

The 12 Days of Christmas in the Data Center

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 15:00:46 GMT

This post originally appeared in Data Center Knowledge on December 21st, 2012.

Jeffrey S. Klaus is the Director of Data Center Solutions at Intel Corporation, where he has managed various groups for more than 12 years. Klaus’s team is pioneering data center power and thermal management solutions, which are sold through an ecosystem of data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software and hardware companies around the world.

Another year’s end, and we’re in the midst of another holiday season. Besides anticipating time off, family celebrations, and gift giving, every IT professional should be anticipating—and planning for—the challenges relating to data center energy management in 2013.

On the First Day of Data Center Christmas: IT Transformation

The data center has moved from a support business to a mission-critical resource. Next year, I could argue that the data center will become the most-critical resource. The elevation of the data center is being driven by demands for transaction speed and exploding numbers of devices and applications used for sales, service, operations, HR, and practically every functional area. Business users will continue to expect more from the data center. They want to improve their productivity with increasingly self-service capabilities, customization, on-demand services, and, above all, reliability that translates to highly available data center services.

Second Day: Organizational Disconnects

Historically, the various IT and facilities teams worked separately. Rarely did hardware, software, networking, and facilities teams come together, and if they did, they rarely understood each other. The 2013 outlook, with escalating energy costs and a continued sluggish global economy, calls for increasing focus on power optimization, and that means providing tools that not only work for all of the various teams, but encourage cooperation among the teams.

Third Day: Affordability of Servers and Storage Drives Up Demand

Dramatic server/storage price reductions over the last decade have led to mass migrations of tasks to online and automated platforms, thus driving up energy consumption in the data center. Power and cooling have become significant portions of the budget; some argue power has become the single biggest expense.

Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Days: Virtualization, Clouds, and Mobility Change Energy Profiles

Rapid change is nothing new in the data center, but 2013 will see several major technology trends gaining wide-scale acceptance. Virtualization is expanding from servers into desktop infrastructure, and users are demanding the flexibility and rapid provisioning that is only possible within a private or public cloud environment. Mobility adds another layer of complexity, as employees bring their own smart devices to work, thus driving up network traffic and server workloads with apps and anytime, anywhere access to data center resources. The data center is being bombarded with service requests, and large companies are already hitting the power restrictions of their facilities as well as the limits of some local utility companies to meet their needs.

Seventh Day: Natural Disaster Preparedness

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and this year’s hurricane season that included Sandy’s devastation of New York and surrounding states are vivid reminders that every data center should be continually refining its disaster plans. The 2013 challenge will be to ensure that disaster plans include prolonging operation with backup power supplies. Disaster recovery should be elevated to a data center best practice, supported by a management solution that offers on-the-fly server adjustments to minimize power draw.

Eighth Day: Battling Methodologies and Tools

Natural disasters are one of the driving forces fueling growth of co-location (colo) facilities. Since many colo companies position their services as insurance for any power outage situation, some are among the early adopters of intelligent energy management solutions. Others have developed their own power management tools, and these will increasingly impact off-the-shelf DCIM solutions.

Ninth Day: The Search for Holistic DCIM Solutions

The ongoing debates about energy management approaches are driving the demand for and evolution of holistic DCIM platforms. Data center teams should look for solutions based on real-time data collection versus less-accurate predictive models. With fine-grained thermal and power monitoring, a DCIM solution should enable a data collection that feeds into holistic analysis and ultimately control of energy behaviors.

Tenth Day: Budget-Restricted Technology Roll-Outs

Of course, even the best solution doesn’t automatically override the budget restrictions stemming from global economic uncertainty. Therefore, data center managers will likely aim for smaller-scale trials and proofs of concepts than originally planned. A phased-in deployment should still be designed to achieve the same results over the long term, with each phase essentially self-funding the next phase with the proven gains in energy efficiency.

Eleventh Day: Vendor Consolidation

DCIM will continue to mature and, along with economic pressures, the rapid rate of change may likely lead to vendor consolidation. This will include large vendors buying up smaller tool vendors, to accelerate the development of their platforms. Maturation ultimately benefits the customer, however, and so the challenge here will be to avoid investments in solutions that may get swallowed up by competitors.

Twelfth Day: Inability to Predict the Future

As the year comes to a close, we are left with many unknowns about the DCIM market and how energy management in the data center will look a year from now. How will the market size compare to the 2013-2014 predictions? What will it take to move the technology to the next level?

We will all be watching and analyzing market movements, but ultimately data center demand will drive the technology. And this demand is growing at a healthy pace. Slow economy or not, energy costs are not going to suddenly plummet. More likely, energy demand will drive up prices, and governments will continue to increase energy taxes. DCIM solutions that build in proactive, fine-grained energy management capabilities are the best—and perhaps only—way to keep the data center sufficiently supplied without breaking the budget.

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Cloud Security Frameworks: Big Data, Architecture and Colin Chapman

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:16:10 GMT

Please note: A version of this blog appeared on InformationeWeek.com in the Cloud Section as an Intel sponsored post

I have a passion for anything with wheels, wings and more recently, float planes. You might remember that if you’ve read any of the blog posts I wrote on enterprise cloud (or the white paper based on them). Now I’m going to use this passion to make a point about cloud security.

Who is Colin Chapman? And what can we Learn from Him?

Anthony Colin Chapman was a design engineer, inventor, and founder of Lotus Cars , a British manufacturer of sports and racing cars known for their exceptional handling and light weight. In a nutshell, Chapman’s design philosophy is “simplify, then add lightness.” In practical terms, this approach ensured his cars were fast— not only on the straights, but particularly in the corners. In fact, between 1962 and 1978, Team Lotus won seven Formula One Constructor titles, six Driver’s Championships, and the Indianapolis 500. Based on results, it seems Colin may have been onto something.

So what exactly does Colin Chapman’s philosophy on lightness and speed have to do with cloud security, big data, and IT architecture? To find out, let’s focus on your current state data architecture strategy.

Current State Data Architecture and Security

Let’s pick a data category that is (according to a white paper from the Ponemon Institute) a consistent source of security concern to enterprises worldwide: customer data.

If I were to audit your enterprise data architecture, how many instances of customers’ data records would I find? One? Three? Six ? M aybe more? Would you be surprised if I told you that as an IT auditor (before I worked for Intel), I would routinely find at least six distinct data records on the same customer in a typical U.S.-based company?

If you continued auditing these islands of customer data, comparing them at the record level, what do you think you might find? Would the information be consistent in content, use, and ownership? Chances of that happening are not very likely.

As an auditor, I generally found approximately 75 percent parity among these records. What about the status of the other 25 or so percent of the information? Would it reflect the nuances of whatever department owned and maintained the record? What would the value of these nuances be to a competitor, or to a bad guy who hacked the record? What would you suspect Colin Chapman might say about the impact on enterprise performance of the (debatably) needless weight of all this duplicate data?

With all this in mind, let’s move the discussion to big data and the cloud.

First, it’s important to frame big data as simply as possible (understanding that it means many things to many people). Basically, big data is about harnessing the power of analytics to mine useful business intelligence (BI) out of massive amounts of ostensibly non-related information. The amount of information is so massive that a typical enterprise data center doesn’t have the capacity to conduct this analysis inside its firewall.

If this definition is fairly accurate, then information about your customers would likely be of value to your BI effort.

Now the question becomes exactly which of the theoretical six customer data records would you use in the cloud as part of your big data strategy? Would you default to using the one record that reflects the greatest percentage of commonality among the six? Or would you simply continue to utilize all the records in the cloud?

Most companies— due to history, effort, potential organizational ownership confrontations, and related difficulties— would take the easiest route and place all six customer records in the cloud. (If your company has done something else, please let me know. I’d love to be proven wrong.)

Structural Security Implications

In Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War[ 1], the author speaks of five types of incendiary attacks. The first is to incinerate men, the second is to incinerate provisions, the third is to incinerate supply trains, the fourth is to incinerate armories, and the fifth is to incinerate formations. Let’s explore this premise using customer records.

Consider that each customer record represents a standalone formation of data provisions, all being exchanged via very long, and very exposed, supply lines. Where one record has its related security concerns, six records, containing fundamentally the same data (at least 75 percent), have more.

I suggested in an earlier blog that bad guys seem to be much more adept at taking advantage of structural security weaknesses than we are at defending them. So not only does the extra weight of these records impact performance (a la Colin Chapman), it also gives the bad guys a target-rich environment that’s easier to breach. Since continuing to move toward the cloud and big data is inevitable, what actions do we need to start— or should we already have in place— to prepare for what I call future state security?

In my next blog post, I’ll begin to define what a future state security framework (and its funding) should look like and offer suggestions on how roles and responsibilities must evolve as the boundaries of your organization expand.

Please join me as I explore the topic of cloud security across upcoming blogs. For now, and reserving the right to add or modify these topics as we move forward, here are the areas I'll address in the coming months:

1. Current State Security

2. Security as a Factor of Cost

3. Business Issues Surrounding Security

4. Evaluating New-World Security Model Investments

5. Security, Data Architecture and Big Data

6. Defense in Depth

As always, I’m interested in your feedback to learn how your organization is selecting data to include in your big data strategy. I’d also like to know if you’re planning on managing your data architecture differently than you did when it only existed inside your firewall. To join the conversation, please contact me through Twitter.

[1] Sun-Tzu, The Art of War, Translated by Ralph D. Sawyer, Fall River Press, 1994, p. 227.

Modernize Your Mission Critical Systems - Webinar Dec. 18th

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 16:45:01 GMT

I'm one of the featured speakers on this webinar. I'd sure like you to join me and ask questions.

Get expert insight for modernizing your mission-critical IT environment

Intel® IT Center Talk to an Expert webinar series:
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
10 a.m. Pacific standard time

Keeping the most important workloads running 24-7 can keep IT managers up at night. It is also essential to be able to rapidly analyze the ever-increasing amounts of data being generated every day. Increasingly, these challenges need to be met in a tight budgetary environment.

You’re faced with a strategic choice: Continue to try to meet these growing demands with legacy infrastructure, or migrate your mission-critical deployments to an open-standards-based environment built upon Intel® Xeon® processor-based solutions.

Join me and our panel of experts to learn a proven approach to modernization. Topics include:

Trends and market data related to mission-critical application modernization and a perspective on the updated solution stack
Strategic options to address the current software, hardware, and business challenges in your mission-critical environment
Practical steps for your mission-critical migration projects, including which workloads to transition first, and ways to divide the project into manageable pieces
Lessons learned in modernizing mission-critical environments, based on a rich history of innovation and global experience from IBM and Intel

Intel Continues to Enhance Software Defined Networking (SDN) Capabilities with VXLAN Optimizations in VMware vSphere 5.1

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 23:19:07 GMT

Now that everyone is talking about Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Overlays, I guess it is time to start talking more about what Intel and VMware have already implemented over the past few releases our products. Over the past few years we have been working together to provide the ability to utilize multiple 10GbE connections per host, separate the network control and data plane using the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch, expand the capabilities of the software storage initiators for iSCSI and FCoE, and optimize the use of capabilities enabled by Intel® Virtualization Technologies for Connectivity (Intel® VT-c). I have just released a technology brief covering many of these topics so I won’t repeat them here, but I think one of the new capabilities in VMware vSphere 5.1 needs a little more explanation: the new VXLAN capabilities that allow the extension of networks beyond the current Layer 2 limitations.

Why is it important?

Traditional physical networking technologies can limit the agility and scalability of the cloud and prevent capacity utilization of virtual server systems. Standard VLAN models are also challenging to manage in a high-performance, multi-tenant cloud environment where scalability is necessary and isolation of logical networks is required. Virtualizing the network layer is one way to effectively address these bottlenecks.

One aspect of the VMware Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture is the capability to virtualize network components to achieve the agility, scale and performance requirements of virtual cloud environments. It creates an abstracted transport network that is quickly provisioned and easily managed because it is structured by software. These virtualized networks can dynamically scale to demand, attach to specific workloads, and move across virtual environments.

Network virtualization overlay technologies allow compute resources to pool across non-contiguous clusters or pods. You can then segment this pool into logical networks attached to applications and span them across virtual resource pools and physical boundaries—a much more manageable and efficient option than VLANs.

Since these logical networks are decoupled from physical network topology, they can be scaled without reconfiguring the underlying physical hardware. This solves the problem of time-consuming planning cycles for VLAN provisioning. It also helps reduce VLAN sprawl and overcomes the limited number of available VLANs. Operations are simplified and application provisioning can be done more effectively.

To solve these challenges, VMware, Intel and other leading networking and silicon vendors have created the VXLAN technology.

As VMware explains it, Virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) is a method for “floating” virtual domains on top of a common networking and virtualization infrastructure. By leveraging industry-standard Ethernet technology, large numbers of virtual domains can be created above an existing network, with complete isolation from each other and the underlying network enables administrators to create elastic, logical networks that span physical network boundaries.

VXLAN works by creating Layer 2 logical networks that are encapsulated in standard Layer 3 IP packets. A "Segment ID" in every frame differentiates the VXLAN logical networks from each other without any need for VLAN tags. This allows very large numbers of isolated Layer 2 VXLAN networks to co-exist on a common Layer 3 infrastructure.

Since VXLAN uses a 24-bit identifier, a single network can support up to 16 million LAN IDs. This is much more than the 4,094 limit imposed by VLAN’s specification, providing improved data encapsulation and more efficient network transport and isolation. This encapsulation is done at a VXLAN end-point that currently either resides in the virtual or physical switch.

In the vSphere architecture the encapsulation is performed between the virtual NIC of the guest VM and the logical port on the virtual switch. This makes VXLAN transparent to both the guest VMs and the underlying Layer 3 network. Although it is transparent to the guest and network, the additional encapsulation mechanism introduces certain performance implications.

To address the impact of this additional encapsulation, Intel once again turned to the VMDq capabilities developed by Intel back in 2007 that enabled VMs to receive network traffic at full line-rate on 1Gb and 10Gb ports. VMDq is a hardware assist that is currently used by VMware NetQueue to dynamically offload, based on processor and network load, the routing and filtering of network packets to network controller’s hardware-based receive queues much like RSS with native workloads.

By refactoring the network driver and enabling the function in the hypervisor’s kernel, Intel and VMware have enabled RSS to accelerate VXLAN traffic by distributing the receive traffic among various queues and CPU cores, achieving full 10Gb line-rate. This RSS capability is only available when using Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapters on vSphere 5.1. It can be enabled by unloading and loading the module with the vmkload_mod ixgbe RSS=”4” on each 10Gb Intel Ethernet CNA on the server.

In the VMware VXLAN performance brief VMware found that the performance of VXLAN on vSphere 5.1 is very close to a configuration without VXLAN, and vSphere 5.1 with VXLAN configured can meet the demands of today’s network-intensive applications.

Intel also supports VXLAN in our Intel Ethernet Switch FM6000 Series products. As part of our Intel Cloud 2015 on-going cloud data center initiative, with particular focus on automation (virtualization), we can support multiple Network Overlay methods in our Intel® Ethernet Switch FM6000 Series products. These ICs are designed for top-of-rack switches, which are situated at the right place in the network to support these new tunneling protocols. Our Intel® Ethernet Switch FM6000 Series devices contain Intel® FlexPipe™ Technology that can be configured to support new and emerging network protocols, including VXLAN. For more information on the capabilities of the Intel® Ethernet Switch FM6000 family check out Gary Lee’s blog on Wired Ethernet.

I know this only scratches the surface of just one of the new SDN features in VMware vSphere 5.1 so keep an eye out for more white papers and blogs. You can also learn more about what Intel and VMware are doing together:

CIOs Reduce Data Center Costs Through Power and Cooling Efficiency

webadmin@intel.com — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:03:22 GMT

Energy costs are the fastest-rising cost element in the data center. Based on recent trends, the EPA estimates that energy consumed by data centers will continue to grow by 12 percent per year. As the director of Intel’s Data Center Manager (DCM) group, I and my team have observed how the data center is now a source for CIOs and their technical teams to add to the bottom line through increased power and cooling efficiency.

In fact, we’ve found three value drivers for power and cooling efficiency: measuring energy use; increasing energy efficiency; and power capacity planning.

In an article I wrote earlier this year for Information Technology (IT) Business Edge, I examine how each of these three drivers can help CIOs to optimize efficiencies and begin to control their rapidly escalating data center costs, to turn this cost center into an opportunity to contribute to the bottom line. To read the blog in its entirety, please check it out on IT Business Edge.

Provided by QuinStreet, Inc; Intel DCM Director Jeff Klaus published the Guest Opinion, “CIOs Reduce Data Center Costs Through Power and Cooling Efficiency” on ITBusinessEdge on Feb. 1, 2012.

Oracle OpenWorld Presents New Horizons for the Cloud

tim.allen@intel.com — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:10:21 GMT

I was in the crowd on Sunday, Sept. 30, when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison welcomed attendees to Oracle OpenWorld with a keynote address that had one dominant theme: Oracle is embracing the cloud in a big way. Mr. Ellison’s address on Oracle’s cloud strategy underscored the news coming out of other IT industry events this year: Enterprise computing is moving to the cloud and even the mightiest of traditional data center technology companies must align their technologies and join the movement.

In the keynote, Mr. Ellison announced several new cloud-based offerings and technologies. He announced that Oracle will soon offer an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) product, based on the company’s software and hardware, including Oracle’s operating system, virtual machine technology, compute services and storage systems networked together with Infiniband* networks.

Mr. Ellison also announced Oracle’s new private cloud service. The Oracle private cloud will be installed in the customer’s data center, but can be completely owned and managed by Oracle. The customer then pays a monthly service fee based on usage.

Another new service announced by Mr. Ellison, the Oracle* Database 12c, is set to launch in 2013. The first true multi-tenant database, Oracle Database 12c (the “c” stands for cloud) includes the memory, processes, and storage of multiple databases all consolidated into one containerized database for greater operational efficiency. It is a first for cloud at the database layer.

Mr. Ellison also announced Exadata* X3, the hardware foundation for the Oracle cloud, which includes 26TB of memory – 4TB of DRAM and 22TB of Flash memory in a single rack. The X3 starts at under $200,000, making it accessible for mid-size businesses.

The X3 compute is powered by Intel® Xeon® E7 processors and storage is powered by Intel Xeon E5 processors. The cloud isn’t just another commodity IT model. To do cloud right requires technology that’s optimized for the cloud. And for leading vendors of cloud services, including Oracle, that means Intel processors and cloud technologies. Intel delivers foundational cloud technologies that promise to optimize, scale, and secure server, network, and storage infrastructures.

As Diane Bryant said in her keynote at OpenWorld, Intel believes it is imperative that businesses remain competitive with efficient, scalable, and converged architectures. This will enable IT to unlock insights from data. On stage, Diane presented a compelling Oracle TimesTen* In-Memory Database demo that highlighted the value of Intel^® Solid State Drives over traditional spinning drives for persistent data. Additionally, Diane had Dr. Marcus Praetzas from Deutsche Bank highlight a migration to Oracle Exadata* engineered systems enabling a 2x performance increase with twice the data for fraud analysis at 20% less power consumption. You can see highlights from Diane’s keynote here.

Intel is proud to play a leadership role in the movement to the cloud, working with industry partners to build an open, interoperable future for cloud computing—with the technologies that can make it a reality.

Take a look at our Cloud Usage Models and see how Intel envisions a world where data and services are shared securely in the cloud.

What’s in a Name: Converged Network Adapters

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 15:00:24 GMT

Several months ago, our flagship 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) server adapters underwent a big change. We retired the Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit Server Adapter family name and replaced it with Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit Converged Network Adapter family. The adapters themselves didn’t change a bit; they’re the same reliable products that have led us to the top spot among 10GbE adapter suppliers[1].

Why did we rename such a successful product line? Quite simply, Converged Network Adapter (CNA) is a much more accurate description of our 10GbE adapters and the features they offer. As IT organizations upgrade their data center networks, we want to make sure they know that these Intel Ethernet adapters meet not only their Ethernet networking needs, but also their converged networking needs.

For you non-networking folks, a CNA is a 10GbE adapter that supports standard LAN traffic as well as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) traffic and iSCSI traffic. Traditional LANs and Fibre Channel (FC) storage area networks (SANs) use completely separate network infrastructures, requiring storage-specific network adapters, switches, and cabling. Converged or unified networks allow LAN and SAN traffic to use or even share a 10GbE fabric, greatly simplifying the infrastructure. CNAs connect servers to these converged networks and eliminate the need for separate, dedicated storage network adapters.

So with all of these great benefits, why didn’t call our adapters CNAs from the start? Answering that one requires a history lesson.

Work on the FCoE standard began in 2007, and the first CNAs appeared several months later. For these early designs, the traditional storage adapter vendors modified their FC host bus adapter (HBA) designs to include the Intel^® 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller alongside their proprietary FC processors. With the FCoE standard still in draft form and a thin ecosystem, these first-generation adapters were little more than proof of concept vehicles.

Meanwhile, we at Intel were working to enable FCoE on the Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller – the same controller that provided the Ethernet functionality for those early CNAs. We realized, however, that enabling FCoE on that controller (and adapters based on it) would require releasing our own FCoE software stack. Introducing yet another proprietary FCoE solution into the market would have made life harder for IT, and that’s the last thing we wanted to do. So we launched our new adapters as 10GbE adapters, not CNAs, and set about making FCoE easier for IT to deploy.

In 2008, Intel founded the Open FCoE project and released our FCoE initiator code to the open source community. Our goal was to get the Open FCoE initiator integrated into the Linux* kernel and help accelerate the adoption of FCoE. Any adapter vendor could use that native support to develop a CNA, giving customers more hardware options and allowing them to use a common set of OS-based management tools. The industry had gone through a similar process with the successful integration of iSCSI, another storage protocol, in every major OS and hypervisor.

In March 2009, after modifications from the Linux community, the Open FCoE initiator was integrated into version 2.6.29 of the Linux kernel and soon found its way into major distributions, including Red Hat and SLES.

In early 2011, we announced that our newest 10 Gigabit Controller, the Intel® 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller and the integrated FCoE initiators in Linux and Windows had been qualified by EMC, Cisco, and NetApp. The Intel® Ethernet Server Adapter X520 family, which is powered by the Intel 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller, was included in this announcement.

And in August 2011, VMware announced Open FCoE integration as part of the vSphere 5.0 launch. With that launch, the Intel Ethernet Server Adapter X520 and Intel 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller had FCoE support in every major operating system and hypervisor. We felt it was important for customers to understand that Intel Ethernet 10 Gigabit Server Adapters were full CNAs, so later that year, we decided to rename them, and the Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapter family was born.

Our 10GbE CNAs are the industry’s top-selling 10GbE adapters. Earlier this year, we expanded the family by adding the Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X540, our fourth-generation 10GBASE-T adapter. Through our Open FCoE efforts, we have given the industry another option for enabling FCoE – an option that doesn’t depend on proprietary hardware and software, can use standard OS-based tools, and scales with advancements in server architectures.

It has been a long journey getting to this point, but sometimes it takes time to do things right.

If you’d like to learn more about the advantages of Open-FCoE-based solutions, check out this blog post on Open FCoE in VMware vSphere.

[1] Crehan Research, Server-class Adapter and LOM, 2Q12