Reduce Costs and Increase Flexibility with Unified Fabric

University Reduces Cost by 50% with FCoE

University Reduces Cost by 50% with FCoE

Cisco and University of Arizona discuss the benefits of Unified Fabric. (4:06 min)

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The typical data center environment supports two to three parallel networks: one for data, one for storage, and possibly one for server clustering. In addition, servers often have dedicated interfaces for management, backup, or virtual machine live migration. Supporting these interfaces imposes significant costs related to interfaces, cabling, rack space, upstream switches, and power and cooling.

Unified fabric consolidates these different types of traffic onto a single, general-purpose, high-performance, highly available network that greatly simplifies the network infrastructure and reduces costs. To do all this, a unified fabric must be intelligent enough to identify the different types of traffic and handle them appropriately.

In addition to reducing total cost of ownership, unified fabric supports broader data center virtualization by providing consistent, ubiquitous network and storage services to all connected devices.

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There are two primary approaches to deploying a unified data center fabric: Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Internet SCSI (iSCSI). Both are supported on Unified Fabric, which provides a reliable 10 Gigabit Ethernet foundation.

With the ratification of the FCoE ANSI T.11 BB-5 standard, Cisco and it's supporting partner ecosystem that includes EMC, NetApp, QLogic, Intel, and Emulex provides customers with a deployable and practical solution today.

Unified Fabric lossless operation also improves the performance of iSCSI, that is supported by both Cisco Catalyst and Cisco Nexus switches. In addition, the Cisco MDS series of storage switches has hardware and software features specifically designed to support iSCSI.

Switches

The Cisco Nexus Family was designed to support unified fabric. Currently, the Cisco Nexus 5000, Nexus 4000 supports DCB and FCoE, while support on the Nexus 7000 is forthcoming, as is FCoE support on the Cisco MDS family.

Unified Computing System

The Cisco Unified Computing System is the next-generation data center platform that unites network, compute, and virtualization resources in a seamless system. Unified fabric plays a central role in the design of the platform.

Host Adapter

Special host adapters, called converged network adapters, are required to support FCoE. Hardware adapters are available from Emulex and QLogic, while a software stack is available for certain Intel 10 Gigabit Ethernet network interfaces.

Virtual Machine Support

FCoE is supported on VMware ESX Server version 3.5u2 and higher.