Analysis: Fabric Convergence Holds Tremendous Promise

Converged fabrics based on Data Center Bridging (DCB) technology hold the promise of reduced capital (CAPEX) and operational (OPEX) expenses in the data center in terms of port costs, cable costs, and power and cooling expenditures. According to this recent piece from the Taneja Group published on InfoStor.com.

“As with prior convergence trends, fabric (or network) convergence holds tremendous promise, and will similarly alter the architecture of enterprise IT services while delivering new levels of cost effectiveness, flexibility, and capabilities within the infrastructure.

“These new capabilities will be a driving force behind adoption, as converged fabrics will address the challenging demands of the consolidated, virtualized data center, for which legacy networks are a mismatch.

“The Taneja Group uses the term Data Center Bridging (DCB) to refer to this next generation converged fabric, while taking the liberty of assuming that general use of the term also includes the full range of converged fabric technologies, including proprietary as well as standardized features that will enable flatter, faster, and more scalable unified wire infrastructures, as well as converged fabrics that are based on TCP offload and the associated protocols that are mapped on top of TCP (iSCSI for storage and iWARP for clustering).

“DCB networks merge both data and storage onto a single unified wire, and through the use of virtualized networks running over the many paths of a mesh-like fabric, can emulate and interoperate with traditional fabrics, while improving on their capabilities.”

Read the full story at InfoStor.com:

“Fabric Convergence: Changing the Nature of Fabric Attach”