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RETHINKING THE DATA CENTER NETWORK

eGuide
At the heart of the enterprise, the data center network is the core of all corporate communications. But as
application environments mature, becoming more services-oriented, those flows are richer and more
compute-intensive and bandwidth-hungry than many legacy networks can handle efficiently. Top that challenge off
with server consolidation, server virtualization and the trend toward convergence of data and storage on a single
fabric. The pressure on the data center network is coming from all sides. Today, many enterprise IT professionals
are rethinking their traditional approaches to the network. In these articles, Network World and its sister publication
InfoWorld explore how to approach networking today, starting with the basics and moving on from there.

IN THIS eGUIDE
2 Everything
You Need to Know
About Building Solid,
Reliable Networks
A networking primer on the
fundamentals, from the right
switches to the right network
monitoring techniques
5 Four Trends Shape 9 Emerging IEEE 13 10G Ethernet 17 Seven Resolutions 19 Data Center
the New Data Center Ethernet Standards Shakes Net Design for Network Network Resources
IT execs adapt to a new reality Could Soothe Data to the Core Management Additional tools, tips
as x86 virtualization trans- Center Headaches Shift from three- to two-tier One analyst’s advice on how and documentation
forms the data center forever Under development is a way architectures driven by need to keep your edge
to offload policy, security and for speed, server virtualization,
management processing from unified switching fabrics
virtual switches

Building Solid, Four Trends Shape the Soothing Data Center 10G Ethernet Shakes Net Seven Resolutions for
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Reliable Networks New Data Center Headaches Design to the Core Network Management
RETHINKING THE DATA CENTER NETWORK
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
BUILDING SOLID, RELIABLE NETWORKS
By Paul Venezia • InfoWorld
A networking primer on the fundamentals, from the right
switches to the right network monitoring techniques
While almost every part of a modern data center can be con-
sidered mission critical, the network is the absolute founda-
tion of all communications. That’s why it must be designed
and built right the first time. After all, the best servers and
storage in the world can’t do anything without a solid network.
To that end, here are a variety of design points and
best practices to help tighten up the bottom end.
Core considerations
The term “network” applies to everything from LAN to SAN
to WAN. All these variations require a network core, so
let’s start there.
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The size of the organization will determine the size and ca-
pacity of the core. In most infrastructures, the data center core
is constructed differently from the LAN core. If we take a hypo-
thetical network that has to serve the needs of a few hundred
or a thousand users in a single building, with a data center
in the middle, it’s not uncommon to find that there are big
switches in the middle and aggregation switches at the edges.
Ideally, the core is composed of two modular switching
platforms that carry data from the edge over gigabit fiber,
located in the same room as the server and storage infra-
structure. Two gigabit fiber links to a closet of, say, 100
switch ports is sufficient for most business purposes. In
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the event that it’s not, you’re likely better off bonding mul-
tiple 1Gbit links rather than upgrading to 10G for those
closets. As 10G drops in price, this will change, but for
now, it’s far cheaper to bond several 1Gbit ports than to
add 10G capability to both the core and the edge.
In the likely event that VoIP will be deployed, it may be bene-
ficial to implement small modular switches at the edge as well,
allowing Power over Ethernet (PoE) modules to be installed in
the same switch as the non-PoE ports. Alternatively, deploying
trunked PoE ports to each user is also a possibility. This allows
a single port to be used for VoIP and desktop access tasks.
In the familiar hub-and-spoke model, the core connects
to the edge aggregation switches with at least two links,
either connecting to the server infrastructure with direct
copper runs or through server aggregation switches in
each rack. This decision must be determined site by site,
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due to the distance limitations of copper cabling.
Either way, it’s cleaner to deploy server aggregation
switches in each rack and run only a few fiber links back
to the core than try to shoehorn everything into a few huge
switches. In addition, using server aggregation switches will
allow redundant connections to redundant cores, which will
eliminate the possibility of losing server communications in
the event of a core switch failure. If you can afford it and
your layout permits it, use server aggregation switches.
Regardless of the physical layout method, the core switches
need to be redundant in every possible way: redundant power,
redundant interconnections, and redundant routing protocols.
Ideally, they should have redundant control modules as well,
but you can make do without them if you can’t afford them.
Core switches will be responsible for switching nearly
every packet in the infrastructure, so they need to be bal-
anced accordingly. It’s a good idea to make ample use of
Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) or Virtual Routing
Redundancy Protocol (VRRP). These allow two discrete
switches to effectively share a single IP and MAC address,
which is used as the default route for a VLAN. In the event
that one core fails, those VLANs will still be accessible.
Finally, proper use of Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP) is
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essential to proper network operation. A full discussion of
these two technologies is beyond the scope of this guide,
but correct configuration of these two elements will have a
significant effect on the resiliency and proper operation of
any Layer-3 switched network.
Minding the storage
Once the core has been built, you can take on storage net-
working. Although other technologies are available, when
you link servers to storage arrays, your practical choice will
probably boil down to a familiar one: Fibre Channel or iSCSI?
Fibre Channel is generally faster and delivers lower laten-
cy than iSCSI, but it’s not truly necessary for most applica-
tions. Fibre Channel requires specific FC switches and costly
FC HBAs in each server – ideally two for redundancy –
while iSCSI can perform quite well with standard gigabit
copper ports. If you have transaction-oriented applica-
tions such as large databases with thousands of users,
you can probably choose iSCSI without affecting perfor-
mance and save a bundle.
Fibre Channel networks are unrelated to the rest of the
network. They exist all on their own, linked only to the
main network via management links that do not carry any
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transactional traffic. iSCSI networks can be built using
the same Ethernet switches that handle nor­mal network
traffic – although iSCSI networks should be confined into
their own VLAN at the least, and possibly built on a spe-
cific set of Ethernet switches that separate this traffic for
performance reasons.
Make sure to choose the switches used for an iSCSI
storage network carefully. Some vendors sell switches
that perform well with a normal network load but bog
down with iSCSI traffic due to the internal structure of the
switch itself. Generally, if a switch claims to be “enhanced
for iSCSI,” it will perform well with an iSCSI load.
Either way, your storage network should mirror the main
network and be as redundant as possible: redundant
switches and redundant links from the servers (whether
FC HBAs, standard Ethernet ports, or iSCSI accelerators).
Servers do not appreciate having their storage suddenly
disappear, so redundancy here is at least as important as
it is for the network at large.
Going virtual
Speaking of storage networking, you’re going to need some
form of it if you plan on running enterprise-level virtualiza-
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tion. The ability for virtualization hosts to migrate virtual
servers across a virtualization farm absolutely requires sta-
ble and fast central storage. This can be FC, iSCSI, or even
NFS in most cases, but the key is that all the host servers
can access a reliable central storage network.
Networking virtualization hosts isn’t like networking
a normal server, however. While a server might have a
front-end and a back-end link, a virtualization host might
have six or more Ethernet interfaces. One reason is per-
formance: A virtualization host pushes more traffic than a
normal server due to the simple fact that as many as doz-
ens of virtual machines are running on a single host. The
other reason is redundancy: With so many VMs on one
physical machine, you don’t want one failed NIC to take a
whole bunch of virtual servers offline at once.
To combat this problem, virtualization hosts should
be constructed with at least two dedicated front-end
links, two back-end links, and, ideally, a single manage-
ment link. If this infrastructure will service hosts that live
in semi-secure networks (such as a DMZ), then it may
be reasonable to add physical links for those networks
as well, unless you’re comfortable passing semi-trusted
packets through the core as a VLAN. Physical separation
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is still the safest bet and less prone to human error. If you
can physically separate that traffic by adding interfaces to
the virtualization hosts, then do so.
Each pair of interfaces should be bonded using some
form of link aggregation, such as Link Aggregation Control
Protocol (LACP) or 802.3ad. Either should suffice, though
your switch may support only one form or the other. Bond-
ing these links establishes load-balancing as well as
failover protection at the link level and is an absolute re-
quirement, especially since you’d be hard-pressed to find
a switch that doesn’t support it.
In addition to bonding these links, the front-end bundle
should be trunked with 802.1q. This allows multiple VLANs
to exist on a single logical interface and makes deploying
and managing virtualization farms significantly simpler. You
can then deploy virtual servers on any VLAN or mix of VLANs
on any host without worrying about virtual interface configu-
ration. You also don’t need to add physical interfaces to the
hosts just to connect to a different VLAN.
The virtualization host storage links don’t necessarily
need to be either bonded or trunked unless your virtual
servers will be communicating with a variety of back-end
storage arrays. In most cases, a single storage array will
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be used, and bonding these interfaces will not necessarily
result in performance improvements on a per-server basis.
However, if you require significant back-end server-to-serv-
er communication, such as front-end Web servers and back-
end database servers, it’s advisable to dedicate that traffic
to a specific set of bonded links. They will likely not need to
be trunked, but bonding those links will again provide load-
balancing and redundancy on a host-by-host basis.
While a dedicated management interface isn’t truly a
requirement, it can certainly make managing virtualization
hosts far simpler, especially when modifying network pa-
rameters. Modifying links that also carry the management
traffic can easily result in a loss of communication to the
virtualization host.
So if you’re keeping count, you can see how you might
have seven or more interfaces in a busy virtualization host.
Obviously, this increases the number of switch ports required
for a virtualization implementation, so plan accordingly. The
increasing popularity of 10G networking – and the dropping
cost of 10G interfaces – may enable you to drastically re-
duce the cabling requirements so that you can simply use a
pair of trunked and bonded 10G interfaces per host with a
management interface. If you can afford it, do it.•
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FOUR TRENDS SHAPE THE NEW DATA CENTER
By Beth Schultz • Network World
IT execs adapt to a new reality as x86 virtualization transforms the data center forever
Thanks to x86 server virtualization and its follow-on tech-
nologies, the state-of-the-art enterprise data center looks
vastly different than it did even a year ago.
And moving from old school to next-generation isn’t just
about hardware and software – it’s a call for a new way of
thinking about the data center, as well.
“Some people are so accustomed to one application,
one server and a methodology that locks you in to one
way of thinking that they’re having a hard time fully under-
standing the new data center,” says Bill Fife, director of
technology for Wholesale Electric Supply Co., in Houston.
“But now with thin replication and replays and synchro-
nization to disaster recovery sites, and virtual machines
being able to move files from data store to data store and
having multiple data stores on the server, and adding net-
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work adapters, you really have to sit back and think about
how you want to run your operations and remember that
you have options. You’re not tied down to any one path.
You can go down one road today and change directions
tomorrow,” Fife says.
Here are four of the major trends in today’s data center:
TREND NO. 1: I/O virtualization
At Wholesale Electric Supply, Fife is capitalizing on the
ability to virtualize I/O, one of the latest of several signifi-
cant technology trends shaping the new data center.
I/O virtualization, also known as I/O aggregation, splits
interconnections across either 10-gigabit InfiniBand or
Ethernet links. Xsigo Systems’ virtual I/O Director uses the
former and Cisco’s Nexus 5000 and 7000 switches the
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latter, for example.
“In either case, you connect this pipe and then you can
get as many virtual Ethernet and Fibre Channel connec-
tions as you want out of it,” says Logan Harbaugh, an in-
dependent analyst and member of the Network World Lab
Alliance. “The architectures are similar, as there’s a limit
to how much they can vary and still provide some level of
functionality.”
I/O virtualization simplifies the hardware scenario in
the data center rather considerably, reducing the number
of connections running to each device while increasing
flexibility. Take into consideration VMware’s best practices
recommendation that you assign a 1G port per virtual ma-
chine (VM). With newer 24-core servers, you could theo-
retically run at least 24 and maybe as many as 50 VMs
on a single piece of hardware, which in turn would mean
needing 50 1G ports, Harbaugh says.
Realistically, even if you could get six four-port Ether-
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net boards, you’d still only be able to support 24 VMs.
“The nice thing about I/O virtualization is that everything
shares the one InfiniBand or 10G Ethernet connection as
lots of 1G pipes.”
At Wholesale Electric, Fife is using Xsigo’s virtual I/O
Director to decouple processing, storage and I/O. “By do-
ing so we’ve essentially built our own cloud because we
can assign processor, RAM, disk and I/O on an as-needed
basis, and then, when they’re no longer needed, get rid of
it all and do something else,” he says. “There are no rigid
guidelines within which we have to operate. We can be
extremely flexible.”
TREND NO. 2:
Data and storage convergence
Today’s data centers typically have distinct data and stor-
age networks, and nobody much likes that situation. “As
soon as people can recombine those two networks, that’s
what they’re going to do,” says Joel Snyder, senior partner
with consulting firm Opus One and another member of the
Network World Lab Alliance.
“My belief and, yes, hope is that we’ll get rid of pure Fi-
bre Channel and go to Fibre Channel over Ethernet [FCoE]
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– but I still see people buying a lot of Fibre Channel be-
cause they’re told it’s the way to go, even though our tests
actually show that the network often isn’t the bottleneck,”
he says. “What you can do with Fibre Channel you can
do with 10G Ethernet and get equivalent or better per-
formance, even if that’s not the belief of SAN buyers and
vendors.”
This is early days for FCoE, but plenty of folks are look-
ing at the technology, says David Newman, president
of Network Test, an independent test firm, and Network
World Lab Alliance member. If nothing more, the technol-
ogy has cost in its favor, he says.
“Besides the capital cost of the equipment, there’s
the operational expense issue. People who run plain old
Ethernet cost less than people who know Fibre Channel,”
Newman says. “On economic grounds, it’ll be cheaper to
provision FCoE than running separate infrastructures.”
Today, Brocade and Cisco have FCoE-capable switches
that fully support all prioritizations and new mechanisms
on Ethernet for delivering Fibre Channel-like service levels,
and other vendors are coming into the fray, as well. So
building a working, end-to-end FCoE network that handles
data and storage is possible today – at least using the
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same vendor’s gear, Newman says. Interoperability is un-
proven as yet.
Scott Engel, director of IT infrastructure, Transplace,
a third-party logistics provider in Dallas, identifies FCoE
as one of the two biggest networking and infrastructure
changes coming to the company’s data center over the
next year. The other is 10G to the servers, he says.
Indeed, Newman says, the real tipping point in the
data center will happen over the next 12 to 18 months
when 10G replaces 1G Ethernet on server motherboards.
“That’ll have all sorts of follow-on effects, enabling data-
storage convergence is just one,” he says.
Watch for this year to be the first with “appreciable
numbers” of 40G switch ports shipping, Newman says.
Fatter network pipes will be needed to accommodate the
higher-speed server connections.
TREND NO. 3:
Faster processors, greater consolidation
By now, most enterprises have server consolidation sto-
ries to share, spun around a virtualization theme. They tell
of impressive physical-to-virtual server ratios, often in the
double digits. But consolidation in the data center is just
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“We’re not talking about the container itself, but the concept, being able to say ‘I need
IT’S THE INSIDE eight racks of servers, four racks of storage, a rack and half of networking, and here’s the
THAT MATTERS power and cooling it will consume,’ and optimize that way.”
—Doug Oathout, vice president of converged infrastructure, HP

beginning, some say.
The maturity and comfort levels around virtualization
are growing, which means enterprises are showing the
willingness to put more and more VMs on a single system,
says Steve Sibley, an IBM Power Systems manager. Within
the year, he adds, the Power 750 will support up to 320
VMs on a single server, the Power 770 and 780 up to 640
VMs and plans for up 1,000 VMs.
The ability to support higher numbers of VMs per phys-
ical server comes on the back of faster processors, of
course. In IBM’s case, the company recently introduced
the Power7, an eight-core chip that delivers four times
the virtualization capability, scalability and performance
than its predecessor, Sibley says. The high-end Power7-
based Power 780 and 770 servers will come with up to
64 Power7 cores, for example.
Intel, too, is readying an eight-core chip, code-named
Nehalem-EX. That chip is expected out by mid-year.
“If you start at the chip level, the ability to deliver more
performance per processor core but also pack four times
as many cores onto a single chip gives a vast amount of
new capacity and capability to put more virtual servers
onto a single platform without sacrificing performance or
capability of the overall system,” Sibley says. “That design
point is enabling systems or offerings that give clients the
ability to consolidate even more than they used to on a
single platform at much cheaper prices than ever before.”
TREND 4: Infrastructure optimization
Will your data center strategy one day include a semi
tractor-trailer full of hands-off gear parked in some spot
selected for optimal cooling and power supply?
Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of research operations
at The 451 Group, says he can imagine so – at least as
one potential alternative to building out new or extending
existing data centers. “Software routes around failures,
and maybe you’d replace that truck with a new one every
three years or so,” he says.
The data center-in-a-box concept is one that bears
watching, agrees Doug Oathout, vice president of con-
verged infrastructure at HP. Companies already are using
data centers like pods or trailers outside their facilities,
optimizing server, storage, networking, cooling and power
distribution resources for that size container, he says.
“Now we see the performance-optimization trend moving
inside the data center.”
This is not to say the data center is going to turn into
parking lot full of semis. But enterprises that run out of
space, electricity, cooling and capacity today can take the
container concept and move that type of asset inside the
data center, Oathout says. “We’re not talking about the

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container itself, but the concept, being able to say ‘I need
eight racks of servers, four racks of storage, a rack and
half of networking, and here’s the power and cooling it will
consume,’ and optimize that way.”
Piecing together a data center section by section is
far less costly than the traditional go-for-broke approach,
and delivering power and cooling a section at a time is
far more efficient than moving it across a long distance,
Oathout says.
“There’s so much more waste when you build a data
center to the ultimate capacity vs. building it to what it
needs to do, so you could almost call this a retrofitting
trend,” Oathout adds. “I’m going to optimize what I’ve got,
doing it with localized power, cooling and energy for the
specific work I want to get done in this environment. Then
I take the next step, with multiple pods, instantiations or
building blocks within the data center. It’s mindboggling
how much more efficient that is compared to building a
monolithic data center that has mega watts and 100,000
square feet of space yet is incapable of supporting the
equipment you need for your next workload.”
Schultz is a freelance IT writer in Chicago. You can reach
her at bschultz5824@gmail.com.

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EMERGING IEEE ETHERNET STANDARDS
COULD SOOTHE DATA CENTER HEADACHES
By Jim Duffy • Network World
Under development is a way to offload policy, security and management
processing from virtual switches
Even as Cisco, HP and others are increasingly invading
each other’s turf in the data center, they are also joining
forces to push through new Ethernet standards that could
greatly ease management of those increasingly virtualized
IT nerve centers.
The IEEE 802.1Qbg and 802.1Qbh specifications are de-
signed to address serious management issues raised by the
explosion of virtual machines in data centers that tradition-
ally have been the purview of physical servers and switches.
In a nutshell, the emerging standards would offload signifi-
cant amounts of policy, security and management process-
ing from virtual switches on network interface cards (NIC)
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and blade servers and put it back onto physical Ethernet
switches connecting storage and compute resources.
The IEEE draft standards boast a feature called Virtual
Ethernet Port Aggregation (VEPA), an extension to physi-
cal and virtual switching designed to eliminate the large
number of switching elements that need to be managed
in a data center. Adoption of the specs would make man-
agement easier for server and network administrators by
requiring fewer elements to manage, and fewer instances
of element characteristics – such as switch address ta-
bles, security and service attribute policies, and configu-
rations – to manage.
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“There needed to be a way to communicate between the
hypervisor and the network,” says Jon Oltsik, an analyst
at Enterprise Systems Group. “When you start thinking
about the complexities associated with running dozens of
VMs on a physical server the sophistication of data center
switching has to be there.”
But adding this intelligence to the hypervisor or host would
add a significant amount of network processing overhead
to the server, Oltsik says. It would also duplicate the task
of managing media access control address tables, aligning
policies and filters to ports and/or VMs and so forth.
“If switches already have all this intelligence in them, why
would we want to do this in a different place?” Oltsik notes.
VEPA does its part by allowing a physical end station
to collaborate with an external switch to provide bridging
support between multiple virtual end stations and VMs,
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and external networks. This would alleviate the need for 2010. Specifically, bg addresses edge virtual bridging: an VEPA allows an external bridge – or switch – to perform
virtual switches on blade servers to store and process ev- environment where a physical end station contains mul- inter-VM hairpin forwarding of frames, something stan-
ery feature – such as security, policy and access control tiple virtual end stations participating in a bridged LAN. dard 802.1Q bridges or switches are not designed to do.
lists (ACLs) – resident on the external data center switch.

Diving into IEEE draft standard details

GETTING VIRTUALIZED DATA CENTERS UNDER CONTROL
The IEEE’s emerging 802.1Q bg and bh standards are designed to address manageability of the growing population of
Together, the 802.1Qbg and bh specifications are de- virtual machines in data centers. They are intended to better align the capabilities of physical Ethernet switches in the edge and
signed to extend the capabilities of switches and end sta- core of data center networks with virtual switches in the server so that operations and management of these elements does
not overwhelm server and network administrators. Here’s a look at key capabilities of the emerging standards:
tion NICs in a virtual data center, especially with the pro-
liferation and movement of VMs. Citing data from Gartner, Virtual Ethernet Port Multichannel Remote Replication
officials involved in the IEEE’s work on bg and bh say 50% Aggregation (VEPA)
of all data center workloads will be virtualized by 2012. Switch Switch Switch
Some of the other vendors involved in the bg and bh Port Port Port
work include 3Com (now HP), Blade Network Technolo- Server Server
Port Extender
gies, Brocade, Dell, Extreme Networks, IBM, Intel, Juni-
per Networks and QLogic. While not the first IEEE speci-
fications to address virtual data centers, bg and bh are
amendments to the IEEE 802.1Q specification for virtual VM VM VM VM VM VM
VM VM VM VM VM VM
LANs and are under the purview of the organization’s
802.1 Data Center Bridging and Interworking task groups. Enables VMs to use external switch to Creates virtual switch ports for Defines a new tag format and uses
access features such as ACLs, policies, simultaneous switching of traffic from port extenders for replicating packets
The bg and bh standards are expected to be ratified VLAN assignments, security, etc. Allows multiple VMs. Adjacent switches use to a remote switch for control and
around mid-2011, according to those involved in the IEEE hairpin turns on same switch port for tags to replicate frames for multicast feature access/assignment.
inter-VM communications. applications.
effort, but pre-standard products could emerge in late

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Cisco and HP are leading proponents of the IEEE effort despite the fact that
OF LIKE MINDS Cisco is charging hard into HP’s traditional server territory while HP is ramping
up its networking efforts ....

“On a bridge, if the port it needs to send a frame on
is the same it came in on, normally a switch will drop
that packet,” says Paul Congdon, CTO at HP ProCurve, vice
chair of the IEEE 802.1 group and a VEPA author. “But
VEPA enables a hairpin mode to allow the frame to be
forwarded out the port it came in on. It allows it to turn
around and go back.”
VEPA does not modify the Ethernet frame format but
only the forwarding behavior of switches, Congdon says.
But VEPA by itself was limited in its capabilities. So HP
combined its VEPA proposal with a Cisco’s VN-Tag pro-
posal for server/switch forwarding, management and
administration to support the ability to run multiple vir-
tual switches and multiple VEPAs simultaneously on the
endpoint.
This required a channeling scheme for bg, which is
based on the VN-Tag specification created by Cisco and
VMware to have a policy follow a VM as it moves. This
multichannel capability attaches a tag to the frame that
identifies which VM the frame came in on.
But another extension was required to allow users to
deploy remote switches – instead of those adjacent to
the server rack – as the policy controlling switches for the
virtual environment. This is where 802.1Qbh comes in: It
allows edge virtual bridges to replicate frames over mul-
tiple virtual channels to a group of remote ports. This will
enable users to cascade ports for flexible network design,
and make more efficient use of bandwidth for multicast,
broadcast and unicast frames.
The port extension capability of bh lets administrators
choose the switch they want to delegate policies, ACLs,
filters, QoS and other parameters to VMs. Port extenders
will reside in the back of a blade rack or on individual
blades and act as a line card of the controlling switch,
says Joe Pelissier, technical lead at Cisco.
“It greatly reduces the number of things you have to
manage and simplifies management because the control-
ling switch is doing all of the work,” Pelissier says.
Cisco, HP say they’re in synch
What’s still missing from bg and bh is a discovery protocol
for autoconfiguration, Pelissier says. Some in the 802.1
group are leaning toward using the existing Logical Link
Discovery Protocol (LLDP), while others, including Cisco
and HP, are inclined to define a new protocol for the task.
“LLDP is limited in the amount of data it can carry and
how quickly it can carry that data,” Pelissier says. “We
need something that carries data in the range of 10s
to 100s of kilobytes and is able to send the data faster
rather than one 1,500 byte frame a second. LLDP doesn’t
have fragmentation capability either. We want to have the

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capability to split the data among multiple frames.”
Cisco and HP are leading proponents of the IEEE effort
despite the fact that Cisco is charging hard into HP’s tradi-
tional server territory while HP is ramping up its networking
efforts in an attempt to gain control of data centers that have
been turned on their heads by virtualization technology.
Cisco and HP say their VEPA and VN-Tag/multichannel
and port extension proposals are complementary despite
reports that they are competing techniques to accomplish
the same thing: reducing the number of managed data
center elements and defining a clear line of demarcation
between NIC, server and switch administrators when mon-
itoring VM communications.
“This isn’t the battle it’s been made out to be,” Pelissier says.
Though Congdon acknowledges he initially proposed
VEPA as an alternative to Cisco’s VN-Tag technique, the
two together present “a nice layered architecture that
builds upon one another where virtual switches and
VEPA form the lowest layer of implementation, and you
can move all the way to more complex solutions such as
Cisco’s VN-Tag.”
And the proposals seem to have broad industry support.
“We do believe this is the right way to go,” says Dhriti-
man Dasgupta, senior manager of data center marketing
at Juniper. “This is putting networking where it belongs,
which is on networking devices. The network needs to
know what’s going on.”•

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10G ETHERNET SHAKES NET DESIGN TO THE CORE
By Jim Duffy • Network World
Shift from three- to two-tier architectures driven by need for speed, server
virtualization, unified switching fabrics
The emergence of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, virtualization and
unified switching fabrics is ushering in a major shift in
data center network design: three-tier switching architec-
tures are being collapsed into two-tier ones.
Higher, non-blocking throughput from 10G Ethernet
switches allows users to connect server racks and top-of-
rack switches directly to the core network, obviating the
need for an aggregation layer. Also, server virtualization is
putting more application load on fewer servers due to the
ability to decouple applications and operating systems
from physical hardware.
More application load on less server hardware requires
a higher-performance network.
Moreover, the migration to a unified fabric that con-
Building Solid,
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verges storage protocols onto Ethernet also requires a
very low-latency, lossless architecture that lends itself to a
two-tier approach. Storage traffic cannot tolerate the buff-
ering and latency of extra switch hops through a three-tier
architecture that includes a layer of aggregation switch-
ing, industry experts say.
All of this necessitates a new breed of high-performance,
low-latency, non-blocking 10G Ethernet switches now hitting
the market. And it won’t be long before these 10G switches
are upgraded to 40G and 100G Ethernet switches now that
the IEEE has ratified those standards.
“Over the next few years, the old switching equipment
needs to be replaced with faster and more flexible switch-
es,” says Robin Layland of Layland Consulting, an adviser
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to IT users and vendors. “This time, speed needs to be
coupled with lower latency, abandoning spanning tree
and support for the new storage protocols. Networking in
the data center must evolve to a unified switching fabric.”
A three-tier architecture of access, aggregation and
core switches has been common in enterprise networks
for the past decade or so. Desktops, printers, servers and
LAN-attached devices are connected to access switches,
which are then collected into aggregation switches to
manage flows and building wiring.
Aggregation switches then connect to core routers/
switches that provide routing, connectivity to wide-area
network services, segmentation and congestion man-
agement. Legacy three-tier architectures naturally have
a large Cisco component – specifically, the 10-year-old
Catalyst 6500 switch – given the company’s dominance
in enterprise and data center switching.
Cisco says a three-tier approach is optimal for segmen-
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tation and scale. But the company also supports two-tier
architectures should customers demand it.
“We are offering both,” says Senior Product Manager
Thomas Scheibe. “It boils down to what the customer
tries to achieve in the network. Each tier adds another two
hops, which adds latency; on the flipside it comes down to
what domain size you want and how big of a switch fabric
you have in your aggregation layer. If the customer wants
like require unique network attributes, according to Nick Lip- ing, highly reliable and faultless with low and predictable la-
pis, an adviser to network equipment buyers, suppliers and tency for broadcast, multicast and unicast traffic types.
service providers. Network performance has to be non-block- “New applications are demanding predictable perfor-
FORK IN THE ROAD
Virtualization, inexpensive 10G links and unified Ethernet switching fabrics are catalyzing a migration from three-tier Layer 3
data center switching architectures to flatter two-tier Layer 2 designs, which subsume the aggregation layer into the access
layer. Proponents say this will decrease cost, optimize operational efficiency and simplify management.

to have 1,000 10G ports aggregated, you need a two-tier

design big enough to do that. If you don’t, you need an- Three tier Core Two tier
Core
other tier to do that.”
Blade Network Technology agrees: “Two-tier vs. three-
tier is in large part driven by scale,” says Dan Tuchler, vice
Aggregation
president of strategy and product management at Blade
Network Technologies, a maker of blade server switches
for the data center. “At a certain scale you need to start
adding tiers to add aggregation.”
But the latency inherent in a three-tier approach is inade-
quate for new data center and cloud computing environments
that incorporate server virtualization and unified switching
fabrics that converge LAN and storage traffic, experts say.
Applications such as storage connectivity, high-perfor- Access Access/Aggregation
mance computing, video, extreme Web 2.0 volumes and the

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New data centers require cut-through switching – which is not a new concept – to
THE OLD significantly reduce or even eliminate buffering within the switch. Cut-through
SWITCHEROO switches can reduce switch-to-switch latency from 15 to 50 microseconds to 2 to 4.
—Robin Layland, principal, Layland Consulting

mance and latency,” says Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista
Networks, a privately held maker of low-latency 10G Eth-
ernet top-of-rack switches for the data center. “That’s
why the legacy three-tier model doesn’t work. Most of the
switches are 10:1, 50:1 oversubscribed,” meaning dif-
ferent applications are contending for limited bandwidth
which can degrade response time.
This oversubscription plays a role in the latency of to-
day’s switches in a three-tier data center architecture,
which is 50 to 100 microseconds for an application re-
quest across the network, Layland says. Cloud and virtual-
ized data center computing with a unified switching fabric
requires less than 10 microseconds of latency to function
properly, he says.
Part of that requires eliminating the aggregation tier in a
data center network, Layland says. But the switches themselves
must use less packet buffering and oversubscription, he says.
Most current switches are store-and-forward devices
that store data in large buffer queues and then forward it
to the destination when it reaches the top of the queue.
“The result of all the queues is that it can take 80 micro-
seconds or more to cross a three-tier data center,” he says.
New data centers require cut-through switching – which
is not a new concept – to significantly reduce or even
eliminate buffering within the switch, Layland says. Cut-
through switches can reduce switch-to-switch latency from
15 to 50 microseconds to 2 to 4, he says.
Another factor negating the three-tier approach to data
center switching is server virtualization. Adding virtualization
to blade or rack-mount servers means that the servers them-
selves take on the role of access switching in the network.
Virtual switching inside servers takes place in a hyper-
visor and in other cases the network fabric is stretched to
the rack level using fabric extenders. The result is that the
access switching layer has been subsumed into the serv-
ers themselves, Lippis notes.
“In this model there is no third tier where traffic has
to flow to accommodate server-to-server flows; traffic is
either switched at access or in the core at less than 10
microseconds,” he says.
Because of increased I/O associated with virtual
switching in the server there is no room for a blocking
switch in between the access and the core, says Asaf
Somekh, vice president of marketing for Voltaire, a maker
of Infiniband and Ethernet switches for the data center.
“It’s problematic to have so many layers.”
Another requirement of new data center switches is to
eliminate the Ethernet spanning tree algorithm, Layland
says. Currently all Layer 2 switches determine the best
path from one endpoint to another using the spanning
tree algorithm.

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Only one path is active, the other paths through the fab-
ric to the destination are only used if the best path fails. The
lossless, low-latency requirements of unified fabrics in virtu-
alized data centers requires switches using multiple paths
to get traffic to its destination, Layland says. These switches
continually monitor potential congestion points and pick the
fastest and best path at the time the packet is being sent.
“Spanning tree has worked well since the beginning
of Layer 2 networking but the ‘only one path’ [approach]
is not good enough in a non-queuing and non-discarding
Building Solid,
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world,” Layland says.
Finally, cost is a key factor in driving two-tier architec-
tures. Ten gigabit Ethernet ports are inexpensive – about
$500, or twice that of Gigabit Ethernet ports yet with 10
times the bandwidth. Virtualization allows fewer servers to
process more applications, thereby eliminating the need
to acquire more servers.
And a unified fabric means a server does not need sepa-
rate adapters and interfaces for LAN and storage traffic.
Combining both on the same network can reduce the num-
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ber and cost of interface adapters by half, Layland notes.
And by eliminating the need for an aggregation layer of
switching, there are fewer switches to operate, support,
maintain and manage.
“If you have switches with adequate capacity and
you’ve got the right ratio of input ports to trunks, you don’t
need the aggregation layer,” says Joe Skorupa, a Gartner
analyst. “What you’re doing is adding a lot of complexity
and a lot of cost, extra heat and harder troubleshooting
for marginal value at best.” •
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RETHINKING THE DATA CENTER NETWORK
SEVEN RESOLUTIONS FOR NETWORK MANAGEMENT
By Jim Frey • Network World
One analyst’s advice on how to keep your edge
Here are some suggestions for “resolutions” [as you look]
forward to the road ahead:
1
Build an understanding of
IP videoconferencing.
It’s big, it’s bad, and it’s going to change your
life, especially when desktop videoconferencing starts to
catch on. Videoconferencing is real-time, requires priority
QoS, low latency and many times more bandwidth than
VoIP. If you had to shake a few skeletons out of the wir-
ing closet when you rolled out VoIP, you better be ready
for a lot more skeletons. Start by finding out what type
of videoconferencing is being used or is planned for your
workforce, and figure out how much load this will create
on your network before it starts a viral ramp-up.
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2
Become more application-aware.
How can you really be in tune with the business or
organization you are supporting if you don’t know
where and how well the really important apps and services
are running? And in the converse, how can you understand
if the loads your network is carrying are even relevant or just
so much streaming audio keeping remote office workers
entertained during the business day? Look to NetFlow (or
similar) data or packet-based monitoring tools to give you
this perspective.
3
Start tracking user experience.
Even if you love the thrill of firefighting and trou-
bleshooting gnarly performance issues across
distributed, n-tier architectures, the greatest satisfaction
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(and kudos) can be gained by recognizing a problem
before calls start coming in to the help desk. And the
first line of defense here is understanding what motivates
users to call the help desk – their experience in using
(or trying to use) the applications and services which IT
provides. User quality-of-experience data can be gained
via on-client agents, synthetic traffic generators (whether
internally managed or externally subscribed), or by pas-
sively monitoring traffic and comparing request/response
patterns. Best practices employ a mix of these, but any
one is better than none.
4
Think proactive/preventative.
Similar to #3, but more broadly speaking, an
ounce of problem prevention is worth at least a
pound of frantic troubleshooting cure. And there are lots
of options here. One of the most effective is to get better
change control in place, thus preventing the “oops” mo-
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Network Management
RETHINKING THE DATA CENTER NETWORK
AN OPEN EXCHANGE
ments when the upgrade you roll out breaks something
else (or a lot of other things). Others include using service
mapping and assessing health and risk on a sustained
basis, or using predictive analytics tools to help you sniff
out the important early warning signs of pending issues
hidden in all of that performance monitoring data you’ve
been collecting.
5
Make friends with the system
admins and app support guys.
OK, maybe that’s two resolutions, but it’s all
about getting along better. Unless you are in the minority,
your cross-organization working relationships usually look
more like a Big Fat Greek Wedding than one big happy
family. Take advantage of the fact that you can help to
measure IT service delivery in a way that the other guys
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Take advantage of the fact that you can help to measure IT service delivery in a way
that the other guys can’t – in context with everything else that is going across the
wire – and share that data openly and freely.
can’t – in context with everything else that is going across compliance auditing, and predictive analytics.
the wire – and share that data openly and freely. Many
7
times, network-facing data can be the most effective Figure out how to leverage
place to start the triage process when no one else is able virtualization.
to get to the root of a problem. One of the more interesting evolutions of man-
agement technology is the growth in the number of hy-
6
Embrace automation. pervisor platforms in place around your network. What
With the onslaught of virtualization (a.k.a. “serv- started purely as a computing system concept has rap-
er hide and seek”), mobility (a.k.a. “client hide idly spread to network equipment, so you can now deploy
and seek”) and composite Web applications (a.k.a. – you management tools to new places as virtual images or vir-
guessed it – “application hide and seek”) you won’t be tual appliances quickly and easily. Keep these in mind
able to keep up with all of the moving parts without auto- when you are trying to work out how to achieve better
mating discovery and upkeep of relationship recognition distribution of management tools and instrumentation.•
and modeling. Automation is also available for respond-
ing to well-known event scenarios with pre-scripted ac- Frey is a senior analyst with Enterprise Management
tions, change management for configuration roll-backs, Associates.
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DATA CENTER NETWORK RESOURCES

1
ProCurve Networking by HP

Interconnecting the Innovation Through End-to-End Unified

WHITE P APER Intelligent EDGE Networking Solutions
ROI of Switched Ethernet Networking Solutions for the
Midmarket HP networking for midsize companies
Sponsored by: HP ProCurve Solution brief
Randy Perry Abner Germanow
August 2009 Customer challenge Innovative HP solutions
Businesses are struggling to increase revenue and In response to these challenges, HP networking
retain customer loyalty due to constant competitive enables businesses to do more with less. Through
Executive Summary
pressure to innovate quickly and deliver greater value a broad portfolio of secure unified networking
New generations of network equipment continue to be more reliable than previous to their customers. Businesses look to technology to products and solutions, HP helps businesses to

www.idc.com
Freeing your
generations. Meanwhile, the applications running across the network have become help spur growth, cut costs, and stay ahead of the reduce complexity, enhance business agility, and
more ubiquitous and more demanding. Underlying this cycle, the network has competition. manage costs.
become much more important to businesses of all sizes — including midmarket firms
Businesses are forced to undergo digital Reduced complexity

network infrastructure — and in all industries.

F.508.935.4015
transformation to remain competitive and enable The network is the foundation for a converged
Driven by the financial crisis, midmarket firms are taking a close look at all budget line new services like supply chain automation, business infrastructure and for advanced applications like
Experience innovation with end-to-end unified solutions items. They demand solutions that provide more than sufficient functionality for their analytics, manufacturing systems automation, ordering unified communications and collaboration.
current networking needs and also leave plenty of headroom to scale their network in systems, and customer relationship management. The
HP simplifies the network with a unified approach—
the years to come, in terms of both bandwidth and functionality. At the same time, solution to IT sprawl lies in a converged infrastructure
wired and wireless hardware, software, management,
they want these network systems to be cost effective to deploy and run. where IT silos are brought together into pools of

P.508.872.8200
Introduction ............................................................................................................... 2 and security. HP’s integrated, easy-to-use management
One company striving to address these needs is HP. HP ProCurve networking virtualized assets, shared by many applications and
features reduce the time and complexity of planning,
HP ProCurve business white paper: Executive summary .............................................. 2 Networks in Transition ................................................................................................. 2 services. The network is the foundation of a converged
products include a broad line of LAN core switches, LAN edge switches, and wireless deploying, and operating wired and wireless LANs
LAN and network security solutions that are all brought together under a unified Challenge among change ..................................... 2 Performance............................................................................................................ 2 infrastructure. The systems and applications are
from a single management platform. This eliminates

Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA

management suite. To determine the return on investment (ROI) associated with
implementation of an HP ProCurve network solution, IDC conducted a study of
medium-sized to large organizations with an HP ProCurve implementation up and
running in their production environment. IDC estimates that these businesses were
able to achieve a 473% ROI; a three-year (discounted) benefit of $38,466 per 100
users; and payback on their initial investment within 5.7 months.
Network Infrastructure Growth Drivers in
Today's Midmarket Environments
The IT industry in general and the networking market in particular are finally showing
signs of stabilizing after the financial crisis of late 2008/early 2009. Looking forward,
IDC anticipates that networking will rebound more strongly than other areas of IT
spending, driven by the fact that the recession has not changed the fundamental
reasons for businesses to continue investing in their networks. Major drivers for
Issue 1 midmarket firms to continue investing in networking equipment include:
2 Freeing your network infrastructure `Migration of voice and video to IP. As businesses look to reduce expenses by
4 The Convergent Policies of Wired and Wireless LANs adopting technologies such as videoconferencing and voice over IP, the increasing
amount of voice and video traffic is creating new challenges for the network.
6 About HP
Response times for Web sites or applications of up to a second used to be
acceptable, but the human eye and ear can detect delays measured in milliseconds.
Simply throwing bandwidth at the problem is insufficient as the mix of application
demands on the network rises. Midmarket firms must incorporate new levels of
bandwidth and intelligence into their network to handle these more complex quality-
of-service requirements.
Redefining the economics of networking
Advanced networking that break IT barriers and redefine the value
of networking
Proprietary vs. open standards............................... 2
Value-driven solutions ........................................... 2
Scalability ............................................................................................................... 3 all interconnected over a critical IT infrastructure—
the network.
the need to maintain multiple management stations,
Security.................................................................................................................. 3 different device and configuration policies, and
Breaking the barriers of networking ........................ 3 Quality of Service (QoS)............................................................................................ 3 Today, businesses seem shackled by a mix of legacy access rights; it also eliminates the need to learn
Conclusion .......................................................... 4 Business Efficiency ................................................................................................... 3 network infrastructures that are difficult to expand, different systems.
For more information ............................................ 4 lack interoperability, and cost too much. With the
ProCurve’s Approach to Network Design: Move Intelligence to the EDGE ............................. 4 Security is built into the network fabric as opposed
booming demand for mobile and fixed access to
ProCurve’s Intelligent EDGE Solutions ............................................................................ 5 to bolting it on. The HP ProActive Defense strategy
multiple applications and services, the rapid evolution
ProCurve Intelligent EDGE Switches ............................................................................ 5 enforces security at the network edge, where users
of wired and wireless technology, and the proliferation
ProCurve Interconnect Fabric ..................................................................................... 6 and devices connect. Policies are enforced consistently
of WLAN devices and applications, businesses simply
for wired and wireless users alike from the same
Intelligent EDGE Networks versus Traditional Core Networks ............................................. 6 lack the ability to scale their networks efficiently, much
management system. Through unified core-to-edge
Traditional Core Networks ......................................................................................... 6 less manage and secure them.
switches, businesses can enable a consistent command
Intelligent EDGE Networks......................................................................................... 7 Due to these rapid changes, businesses struggle to line interface, common software, and interchangeable
The Value of Deploying an Intelligent EDGE Network ........................................................ 8 remain agile and ensure business continuity. Network modules. In addition, HP’s optimized WLAN solutions
Minimize Investment Risk.......................................................................................... 8 executives relentlessly seek a clear and documented provide simple and cost-effective migration to IEEE
return on investment for every project. The networks 802.11n environments that scale to deliver high-speed
Improve Network Performance and Availability ............................................................. 8
must be simple to manage to support such diverse WLAN capacity as businesses grow.
Increase Network Security......................................................................................... 8
applications and adapt to changing needs, and they
Bolster Choice and Flexibility ..................................................................................... 8 must be cost-effective to support business objectives.
Summary................................................................................................................... 9
For More Information ................................................................................................. 10

Featuring research from

White Paper Research Report White Paper White Paper Solution Brief
Freeing Your Network IDC: ROI of Switched Redefining the Economics Interconnecting the Innovation Through
Infrastructure featuring Ethernet Networking of Networking Intelligent EDGE End-to-End Unified
Gartner Solutions Networking Solutions
See why Gartner and the network in- Learn how building upon the ProCurve
The evolution of networks has trans- IDC interviewed several organiza- dustry have positioned HP as a leader Adaptive EDGE Architecture, moving Through a broad portfolio of
formed business while simultaneous- tions to determine their future and the fastest-growing enterprise intelligence and functionality to the secure unified networking
ly creating legacy systems that have networking strategies. Learn how Ethernet LAN networking vendor. HP’s edge of the network and interconnecting products and solutions, HP helps
become difficult to manage. Learn they built a foundation to meet commitment to industry-standards all devices with Interconnect Fabric of- businesses to reduce complexity,
about the benefits of converged infra- network switch demands with an can help organizations optimize their ferings, can help companies effectively enhance business agility, and
structure and revised policies to take average 5.7 month payback and networks. establish a secure, mobile, multi-service manage costs. Review this Solu-
systems into the next generation. zero annual maintenance fees. infrastructure. Minimize investment risk tion Brief for midsize companies.
Read more >> and ensure maximum value — immedi-
Read more >> Learn more >> ately and well into the future. Read more >>

Learn more >>

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