The Changing Dynamics of the Data Center

Many recent trends, including server consolidation, have helped CIOs optimize and streamline their data center infrastructures. But some industry figures say you ain’t seen nothing yet.

With 10-gigabit Ethernet deployments on the rise, 2007 is potentially well-positioned to be the year that the technology begins to propel virtualization and fabric conversion onto the main stage. The 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch market saw substantial growth in the second quarter of 2006, according to research firm Dell ’Oro Group.

But this is more than just a speeds, feeds and utilization issue. For CIOs, this has the potential to change the dynamics of having to buy more and more equipment in almost a linear fashion to scale to meet business demands, says Dave Zabrowski, president and CEO of 10-gigabit Ethernet server and storage adapter vendor Neterion.

“With virtualization and fabric conversion they can buy less equipment and scale in a much more efficient way,” he says.

Here’s how Zabrowski sees the future shaping up: Virtualization has been a buzzword in recent years, but it has yet to make a big impact on systems running applications that demand the highest performance, he contends, because of the management overhead typically imposed by the hypervisor layer.

“You want to use your highest-performing assets in a modular computing fashion, but because the hypervisor has such a punitive penalty on performance, the industry has not really been able to embrace [virtualization on] performance servers,” he says. Industry experts estimate that only about 5% of businesses are using virtualization on Windows or Linux servers.

At 10-gigabit Ethernet speeds, I/O demands become more intense as businesses put more and more workloads onto fewer servers. The solution, he says, is to process data in virtualized environments at the hardware level.

“From a power, performance and cost perspective, the most efficient way is to go straight into the hardware,” Zabrowski says.

The company says its Neteiron’s Hyperframe IOV (I/O Virtualization) architecture includes a number of features to optimize the network interface in a virtualized environment, including multiple separate receive and transmit queues, independent Direct Memory Access (DMA) engines, separate network addresses, and the ability to direct packets through the PCI-Express fabric.

Many of these features for providing hardware support at the I/O component level are already embedded in its Xframe 10 gigabit Ethernet adapters. It’s working with vendors such as HP on the PCI SIG IOV working group to extend the PCI-Express protocol to natively support virtualization, and it expects that next year will see the arrival of products supporting the specification.