The Role of the Network in the Data Center
I read a few days ago and commented back on Robin Bloor’s blog about the role of the network in the data center. Robin has a very interesting opinion and we had a good dialog about how the role of the different devices in the data center are most likely to evolve. Take a read here.
Additionally this article was then followed up with a rather telling piece from Information Week linked in here.
Between these two, and I am sure a host of others I feel very confident re-affirming the statement I made in Robin’s rather eloquent write-up.
You need servers, storage, and networks in order to process workload, store the results, and communicate it to another user, server, or application. A deficient infrastructure in any of them reduces the efficacy of all of them.
I always had this theory though - Whenever a network transport is faster than a server bus speed the peripheral connecting to that bus will go from a parallel connection to a serial one to a shared/packetized one.
Printers, Hard Drives, CPU-CPU Interconnect, and potentially even memory will follow this theorem. Thus over time all of the elements necessary to process an IT workload will be not only interconnected by a common fabric, but more importantly connected with a layer of abstraction (hypervisors anyone?) that will make any resource available to any workload at any time.
dg
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 04:55PM PST
http://cpufun.info Jul 4, 2008
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