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Driving 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adoption in the Data Center

INTRODUCTION

Data volumes and network bandwidth consumed by data centers double every 18 months while devices accessing networks double every 2.5 years. To support this thirst for data, a corresponding advance in network bandwidth needs to occur. Given that Ethernet has become the networking infrastructure of not only the Internet, but also information service delivery to corporations of all sizes, the logical answer is migration to the next advance in Ethernet – 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

What’s driving the evolution to 10 Gigabit Ethernet? The drive comes from advances in other information technologies – multi-core processors, virtualized environments, advances in storage architectures, server clustering and consolidation, new forms of information delivery using the Internet, and the next wave of digital media content. Associated with these technological advances is the advance in networking itself that is making 10 Gigabit Ethernet affordable across the network from the core to the edge. Intel and Extreme Networks® are two companies leading the evolution to 10 Gigabit Ethernet adoption. Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapters offer reliable performance, feature flexible virtualization, and deliver cost-effective storage networking. Extreme Networks provides 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking solutions for Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching in both modular and fixed configurations. Extreme Networks versatile design for these configurations offers customers a choice while providing an excellent migration path from existing Gigabit Ethernet network infrastructures. By combining 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology from Intel and Extreme Networks, customers can realize the advantages of 10 Gigabit Ethernet today at affordable costs in seamless migration and coexistence with their existing Ethernet data center network. DRIVING 10 GIGABIT ETHERNET ADOPTION IN THE DATA CENTER

Motivation Driving 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings continue to evolve and improve, organizations can adopt strategies to consolidate their storage infrastructure in Today, most server, desktop, and laptop systems come standard the data center on an Ethernet network achieving improved with Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. It has become natural for us to economies of scale and simplified management of the just “plug into” a Gigabit Ethernet network. Although 10 Gigabit infrastructure all delivered at an affordable cost. Ethernet has been around since 2002, its adoption has been limited to the core of data center networks. That is, until now. Today, Ethernet-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) systems are being deployed by Advances in technology delivering 10 Gigabit Ethernet and large and small organizations to realize these benefits. The falling prices are driving the adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet ability to scale storage delivery performance up to 10 gigabits from the core to the edge of the network. Let’s look at the per second gives these organizations a simple and cohesive motivators driving the adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet in migration path for their NAS and SAN storage systems. modern data centers. Server Clustering Virtualized Environments Another major trend is data centers clustering together In today’s information technology vernacular, “server servers to improve performance and application availability. virtualization” means the ability to run more than one It is not uncommon to hear of physical server deployments Operating System (OS) image on a single physical server. in the hundreds consolidated in a single data center. Server virtualization uses a software hypervisor running as the Applications are being rewritten to take advantage of the kernel on a physical server to present multiple Virtual Machine parallel processing paradigm made available through server (VM) images to the guest OSs. In this model, the OSs can be clustering to improve not only application performance, but disparate; for example, Microsoft Windows* Server and Linux* also application availability. Ethernet is becoming the running on a VMware hypervisor on an Intel® Xeon® processor- de facto choice for clustering servers in a network. Using based server. Key benefits to server virtualization are: Inter-Processor Communication (IPC) over an Ethernet • Better utilization of physical server resources (specifically network, applications can deliver higher degrees of with multi-core processors) parallelization as long as the network throughput delivers the required performance. • Improved deployment of applications on virtual servers (you don’t need to order another physical server to deploy The ability to migrate to 10 Gigabit Ethernet clustered an application) interconnect solutions provides customers the ability to scale parallelized applications without the turmoil of moving to a • Ability to balance physical server workloads across many different network technology to realize increased bandwidth, virtualized servers lower latencies, and better performance. However, along with these benefits come challenges. It is easy to overtax the physical I/O resources in a virtualized server Web 2.0 environment. Each virtualized OS thinks it has exclusive use It has been estimated that the volume of web traffic will of the physical resources when in reality these resources are experience a fifty-fold increase by the year 2015. What’s shared across the virtualized OSs running concurrently on a driving this web traffic increase? Today, we have the delivery physical server. The result is an oversubscription of resources of video, image, and audio content. Eight hours of video and, in a networking environment, the physical network content is loaded onto YouTube* every minute. In the near server adapter. The problem with the demand on the network future, online video will transition to High-Definition (HD) by a multi-core processor is exacerbated in a virtualized video, which is seven to ten times more bandwidth-hungry environment. One logical solution is to increase network than today’s video streams. Corporate delivery of information bandwidth to satisfy this increased virtualized server both externally in describing products and services and network demand by deploying 10 Gigabit Ethernet at the internally for training and information delivery will be delivered network edge. through HD video and audio streams. To handle these vast bandwidth requirements traffic management appliances will Ethernet-Based Storage be required to spread out the workload to clustered servers in Ethernet-based storage offerings provide huge volumes a server load-balancing configuration. of connected data at attractive prices. As these storage

2 DRIVING 10 GIGABIT ETHERNET ADOPTION IN THE DATA CENTER

To support this performance demand requires network Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit Converged Network performance that is equal to the task. No longer will Gigabit Adapters Ethernet be sufficient to respond to the demands of advances Intel has been a leading supplier and innovator of Ethernet in the Web 2.0 Internet. Addressing this challenge will be products for more than 30 years. Intel® Ethernet products 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions that drive through the traffic are designed for reliable performance, feature flexible I/O management appliances directly to the web-facing servers virtualization, and deliver cost-effective storage over Ethernet. handling Web 2.0’s data-intensive requests. The newest generations of Intel Ethernet controllers and Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) are optimized for Digital Imaging and Editing the I/O enhancements in Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family- One of the fastest advances in technology has been in the based servers and bring low-power, cost-effective 10 GbE area of digital imaging. By 2010, it is estimated that medical connectivity to LAN on motherboard and converged network imaging alone will consume 30 percent of the world’s data adapter designs. storage. Human interaction with digital images will be through a global interconnected network as productivity gains are realized by effectively using this information form. To move hundreds of gigabytes of digital content to computers in a timely fashion for display and revision will require rethinking the infrastructure and cabling requirements for computers.

Cost Intel Ethernet CNAs support fiber and copper interfaces, When the 10 Gigabit Ethernet specification was released in including 10GBASE-T 2002, the cost of early 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings exceeded USD 10,000 per port. The only rational use at this price was in the core of the network. Extreme Networks can now deliver 10 Reliable Performance Gigabit Ethernet at a cost of USD 500 per port. Reliable hardware and software drivers are major With this cost advantage, 10 Gigabit Ethernet will move out of differentiators for Intel and are the result of long-term the core and access layers of the network to the network edge. leadership in the industry. Intel Ethernet controllers and 10 Gigabit Ethernet adoption will further accelerate the market adapters are supported in all leading operating systems for copper-based adapters and switches making network and hypervisors, and customers consistently rate the quality infrastructure costs even more reasonable. and stability of Intel drivers as a major factor in their purchase decisions.

The Solution Intel Ethernet controllers and adapters feature intelligent data Moving to a 10 Gigabit Ethernet environment has never path offloads that accelerate traffic across a wide range of been easier. With solutions available from Intel and Extreme applications without moving the network stack to a separate Networks, deploying 10 Gigabit Ethernet in both copper and processor on the adapter. Using the power of the latest fiber infrastructures in the data center is both affordable and generation of Intel Xeon processors to handle network traffic efficient. By using Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapters saves power and cost by not relying on additional memory and Extreme Networks 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching solutions, and offload processors on the adapter. the reality of achieving 10 Gigabit performance at the edge of Intel® Data Direct I/O Technology (Intel® DDIO) is a feature the network is obtainable today. introduced with the Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family. Intel DDIO allows Intel Ethernet controllers and adapters to talk directly with the processor cache, helping to deliver increased bandwidth, lower latency, and reduced power consumption. Intel Ethernet

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products were designed to take advantage of the integrated into the Linux kernel. Integrated FCoE initiators are improvements in communication between host and network also available for Microsoft Windows and VMware vSphere. controller that Intel DDIO provides. Tests performed by Intel Ethernet product and their support for native storage Intel show that Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapters initiators have several advantages over full offload-based in Intel Xeon processor E5 family-based servers with Intel converged network adapters: DDIO deliver more than double the bandwidth of previous- generation platforms. • Ease of use. Intel Ethernet converged network adapters (Intel Ethernet CNAs) use the management interfaces that Flexible I/O Virtualization are integrated into the OS or hypervisor. A single Intel Ethernet CNA is capable of carrying LAN, NFS, iSCSI, or Server consolidation using virtual machines on fewer physical FCoE traffic. servers lowers data center capital and operating costs. Larger workloads also take advantage of dramatic performance • Reliability. Intel Ethernet CNAs use native initiators that improvements from the latest Intel Xeon processors. are developed and tested by the operating system or hypervisor vendor. They have also been qualified for iSCSI To optimize these opportunities, Intel® Virtualization and FCoE by major storage vendors, including EMC and Technology for Connectivity (Intel® VT-c) provides I/O NetApp. technologies that optimize virtualized performance. Intel VT-c is a collection of I/O virtualization technologies that enables • Cost-Effectiveness. OS or hypervisor integration means lower CPU utilization, reduced system latency, and improved customers can implement unified networking without networking and I/O throughput. adapters that require costly onboard processors and additional memory. Intel Ethernet CNAs are priced • Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) dramatically significantly lower than competing CNAs. improves traffic management within the server, helping to enable better I/O performance from large data flows while As a co-founder of the Ethernet standard in 1982, along with decreasing the processing burden on the hypervisor. Xerox and Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel is uniquely positioned to drive the industry transition to broad 10GbE • PCI-SIG Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) provides deployment. near native-performance by providing dedicated I/O to virtual machines, bypassing the software virtual switch in the hypervisor completely. It also improves data isolation Extreme Networks 10 Gigabit Ethernet among virtual machines, and provides flexibility and Switching Solutions mobility by facilitating live virtual machine migration. Extreme Networks is known for its leadership and innovation in Ethernet switching. With more than 10 years of experience Cost-Effective Unified Networking developing innovative products to advance network technology, it is not surprising that Extreme Networks is a Intel’s Unified Networking solutions are enabled through a leader in providing 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching solutions. combination of standard Intel Ethernet products along with With Extreme Networks award-winning BlackDiamond® X8 trusted network protocols integrated in Operating Systems series switches the customer can tailor the chassis through and hypervisors. purpose-built core, aggregation, and edge modules to fit the Intel led the charge to make iSCSI available on every server exact requirements of data center deployments. The new by driving iSCSI initiators into different operating systems. Summit® X670 switch will support 48-ports of wire-speed Today, iSCSI is widely available, and the vast majority of iSCSI 10 GbE copper RJ45 with 40 GbE uplink capability. The connections use native OS or hypervisor-based initiators, and Summit X670 is ideal as a top-of-rack switch for data center most iSCSI host bus adapters have been discontinued. server connectivity. Correspondingly, the new BlackDiamond X8 copper blade will support 48-ports of wire-speed 10 Intel is following a similar approach for enabling FCoE and is GbE copper RJ45 with 384 total ports inside the chassis. focused on bringing broad access to FCoE by enabling various Complementing the BlackDiamond X8 and the Summit X670 OSes and hypervisors with FCoE initiators. Intel made its FCoE is Extreme Networks ExtremeXOS® modular OS resulting in a initiator code available to the open source community via the highly reliable, yet simple to configure solution that meets the Open FCoE project in 2007, and the native initiator is now demanding networking needs found in modern data centers.

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Summit X670 Series Switch The Summit X670 series is available in two models: Summit X670V and Summit X670. Summit X670V provides high density for 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching in a small 1RU form factor. The switch supports up to 64 ports in one system and 448 ports in a stacked system using high-speed SummitStack-V160, which provides 160 Gbps throughput and distributed forwarding. The Summit X670 model provides up to 48 ports in one system and up to 352 ports in a stacked BlackDiamond X8 Series Switch system using SummitStack-V longer distance stacking Designed for large, virtualized data centers and clouds, the technology (up to 40 km with 10GBASE-ER SFP+) . Extreme Networks BlackDiamond X8 switch provides high With its versatile design, the Summit X670 series provides density 10 GbE and 40 GbE. Furthermore, the BlackDiamond® high density Layer 2/3 switching with low latency cut-through X8 was built with green operations in mind, resulting in low switching, and IPv4 and IPv6 unicast and multicast routing to per port power consumption, which when combined with high enable enterprise aggregation and core backbone deployment density, can result in a lower Total Cost of Ownership. in AC-powered and DC-powered environments. With massive scalability, the BlackDiamond X8 offers 2.56Tbps Summit X670 series simplifies network operation with the per slot capacity and more than 20Tbps total switching ExtremeXOS modular Operating System (OS), which is used capacity with 768 ports of line rate 10 GbE or 192 ports of amongst all Extreme Networks Summit and BlackDiamond line rate 40 GbE in a single chassis. All of this is offered in Ethernet switches. The high availability ExtremeXOS operating a relatively small footprint of only 14.5 RU, or one-third of a system provides simplicity and ease of operation through the standard rack. The BlackDiamond X8 provides a standards- use of one OS everywhere in the network. based “fabric in a box” which can eliminate expensive multiple-box and multi-tier solutions – along with their inter- device connectivity, uplink bandwidth and latency challenges. ExtremeXOS Common to both the BlackDiamond X8 and the Summit The BlackDiamond X8 has the ability to automatically track X670 is a modular OS: ExtremeXOS. With one OS supporting and report 128,000 Virtual Machines (VMs) and automatically Extreme Networks entire product switching portfolio, migrates Virtual Port Profiles (VPPs) in a touch-less manner configuring and maintaining the network environment has through XNV™ (ExtremeXOS Network Virtualization). never been simpler. ExtremeXOS extensive XML APIs and CLI Automated configuration and provisioning further contribute to simplicity of deployment and operation.

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scripting facility allows network administrators to manage Conclusion a complex data center network through a single interface, One thing is certain: The demand for information is growing eliminating the need to learn multiple management interfaces. exponentially. Along with this growth is a corresponding Combined with ExtremeXOS ease of management is its rich- demand for delivering this information to the applications feature set. Some of these features relevant to the data center and end-users that process it. Advances in information- include seamless support for mixed IPv4 and IPv6 network processing technology, such as multi-core processors, server environments, security support through Access Control Lists virtualization, dramatically increased capacities of storage (ACLs) to provide protection to the network, and its high systems, and a wealth of new information forms, all are availability architecture and Ethernet Automated Protection driving the demand on networks to deliver more information Switching (EAPS) protocol to reduce network downtime for faster and more efficiently. To achieve these ends, Intel and business continuity of mission-critical applications. Extreme Networks are providing 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions for existing and new data center networking deployments, ExtremeXOS common modular OS image spanning the entire ensuring that increased network demand can be realized at network switching environment affords a data center the affordable costs. necessary command-and-control infrastructure while at the same time removing inherent network complexities.

Deploying Extreme Networks 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching solutions at the data center network edge enables servers, storage systems, and applications to achieve greater levels of performance and productivity. These performance and productivity improvements can dramatically change the landscape of information processing as we know it today— delivering vast amounts of information to applications and users at data rates previously not attainable. The result is new efficiencies of scale and the corresponding realized cost savings as productivity increases.

6 FOR MORE INFORMATION

Intel® Ethernet: www.intel.com/go/ethernet Extreme Networks®: www.extremenetworks.com

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