Data Centers notes

The Standards You’ll Need in the

Next Generation Data Center

By Paul Rubens

June 6, 2011

Many data centers are reaching the limits of their capacity: space and power

are in short supply, cooling is diffcult to achieve and the management of

servers and their associated cabling is becoming increasingly complex.

The good news is that “next generation” data centers promise increased

automation, greater energy effciency, reduced complexity and lower total cost

of ownership (TCO), using a variety of technologies including blade servers,

virtualization, cloud computing and, particularly, high-speed converged networking.

A crucial step in the evolution of the next generation data center is the

development of standards for the new technologies involved. That’s because

it’s only once these standards have been established that you can invest in next

generation technologies with the knowledge that any hardware you buy will be

compatible with other manufacturers’ products, protecting the value of your

investments and ensuring that you are not locked in with a particular vendor.

Here are three of the most important standards that are emerging for the

data centers of the future:

Data Center Bridging (DCB) and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE)

10Gb/s Ethernet is one of the most signifcant enabling technologies for

next generation data centers, and it was standardized by the IEEE back in

2004. Fast Ethernet networking is important because it makes it possible

for you to use a single networking fabric to transport LAN, storage and

inter-process communication (IPC) traffc. This has a number of benefts,

including simplifying your data center infrastructure, reducing the amount

of hardware you need —including certain types of storage-specifc switch

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es and host bus adapters (HBAs) — and reducing your administrative and

power and cooling costs.

But carrying the storage traffc that you currently transport on a dedicat

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ed storage network over a conventional Ethernet network presents some

technical challenges: essentially you are asking an Ethernet network to

do something that it was never designed to do.

This problem prompted the development of a number of enhancements

to Ethernet to make it more suitable for use in data centers as a unifed

networking fabric. The set of network standards that are being defned

for these enhancements are called Data Center Bridging (DCB), and one

implementation of these emerging network standards defned by lead

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ing networking companies, including Brocade, is known as “converged

enhanced Ethernet,” (CEE).