Unified Fabric: The New SUV or Hybrid?
Interesting analogy I saw today in story from Byte & Switch blogger Frank Berry. He used the analogy of SUVs and their rather spartan initial models (can you say “early Ford Bronco” or “Cash for Clunkers”?) to the recent unified networking (in Cisco-speak “unified fabric”) offerings—the converging of traditional data and storage traffic over a single low latency and high performance 10Gb Ethernet pipe. I’m not sure if today’s unified networking offerings are quite as stripped down as a 1980s Bronco, and I’m sure the energy efficiency is much better. In fact, they may be much closer to an early 2000s Toyota Prius…
If you look at today’s unified networking offerings, many of the primary use cases are covered—from server virtualization and VM mobility support, to FCoE and multiple versions of fiber channel. While FCoE still has a ways to go for full standardization and extension, offerings from Cisco (and other vendors over time) can today achieve the radically simpler configurations (can you 8-10—> 2 connections per server) and opex savings that drove the initial requirements for this technology + products. I’m not sure an old 1983 Ford Bronco could claim it provided solid four wheeling over mountains, was a good daily driver, and had 3rd fold down seats for 7 when hauling kids + friends to school… That said, unified networking (aka “fabric”) still has a long road ahead of it to become the standard for data center-wide transport. Not the least of which will be evolving buying centers and purchasing patterns, as Frank notes in his posting. I would debate a little here though, and share my view that the ROI of unified networking, and creating an external push towards a less silo’ed and more common-goaled data center team will shift some IT teams towards these solutions sooner than later, and not purely from legacy storage switch vendors as noted, but also from their Ethernet switch vendor. Overall, this will be a very interesting networking/IT architecture trend to follow, and hopefully the net result will be a more dynamic, energy efficient IT infrastructure, vs. more massive, gas burning Excursions and Suburbans hitting the data center highway… What are your thoughts on converging data center Ethernet and storage traffic—both benefits and your team’s willingness to deploy? Do you see a Bronco, Prius or something else?
Posted by Mark Weiner at 02:30PM PST
Frank Berry Sep 1, 2009
I don’t want to beat this horse (a Bronco) to death, but research shows that SUV customers routinely bought big SUVs because they thought: 1) they were more safe in a SUV than a car, 2) drivers felt more in control, and 3) drivers felt more empowered to deal with rough road conditions.
Economic conditions are driving big-SUV buyers to more cost-effective alternatives, but I expect netowrk architects want to design-in enteprise class capabilities so 1) their job is safe, 2) so they can manage efficiently to stay in control, and 3) be empowered to deal with rapidly growing demand. I expect these network architects will find CEE is the cost-effective alternative to older technologies and gives them the best of both worlds.
Oh, and visit a SUV showroom with your children and ask them how they feel about the flat-screen TV, hookups for their video game controllers, juice box holders, reading lights, cell phone pockets, and of course iPod connections. No kid on the planet is going to pass up the SUV user experience for a Prius.