via Data center outsourcing dilemma: CIOs weigh in on owning vs. renting.

Appropriately called HP Flexible Data Center or Flex DC, as I have seen it referred to, it leverages a modular design of what HP refers to as a “Butterfly,” with a core building in the center and four quadrants of data center space. Scale is achieved by adding quadrants or creating multiple “Butterflies,” essentially creating a campus of data centers. HP claims significant cost savings and a turn time of less than a year. Not too bad when you consider these are real brick and mortar data centers and not containers or pods. Will be interesting to see if this is the approach HP will take with its ES (EDS) data center consolidation effort and how customers respond to this standardized approach. Would be great to hear from any customers that are going down this path.

Read Bob’s other blog entries at Data Center Continuum.

The federal government is now catching on as well and recently (June 10, 2010) President Obama wrote a memo titled “Disposing of Unneeded Federal Real Estate” which called for a moratorium on new data centers and urged that consolidation plans commence almost immediately. The memo reads,

In addition, in order to address the growth of data centers across the Federal Government, agencies shall immediately adopt a policy against expanding data centers beyond current levels, and shall develop plans to consolidate and significantly reduce data centers within 5 years. Agencies shall submit their plans to OMB for review by August 30, 2010.

The complete memo can be found here.

The Obama administration has also been a vocal supporter of “cloud” computing as well. While many of the large, private enterprises that have embarked on consolidation strategies have retained control, others are looking to outsource their data center or leverage software-as-a-service (SaaS) models. Indeed, the EDS consolidation effort is specifically targeted at enabling more efficient and flexible computing options and ESG research indicates that those organizations that are focused on consolidating data centers are almost twice as likely to be exploring outsourced IT or SaaS models. This should be good news for those selling to the federal market and services organizations with substantial IT outsource businesses.

Read more of Bob’s blog entries at Data Center Continuum.

via SAS and SATA, solid-state storage lower data center power consumption.

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

• How many data centers do organizations operate today? How do these numbers vary by company size and industry?
• To what extent are organizations planning to reduce/consolidate their overall number of data centers?
• How many organizations currently have new data center construction projects underway?
• Where do data center consolidation and new data center construction initiatives rank on organizations’ current list of IT priorities?
• How do data center consolidation and construction plans vary by company size class and industry?
• How do the number of existing data centers and spending mode impact data center consolidation?
• What role will outsourcing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models play in data center consolidation plans?
• What is the impact of consolidation efforts and corporate risk tolerance on new data center construction?
• What are the greatest factors influencing new data center construction?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this 24-page report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report Data Center Consolidation and Construction Trends Executive Summary

Overview

IT organizations face increasingly complex environments. As the demand for more compute and storage increases, organizations continue to add more resources to accommodate that growth. These are not only physical resources; virtual resources come into play as well. This is especially true in environments that continue to experience widespread adoption of server virtualization technologies. In fact, increased use of server virtualization has topped ESG’s IT spending priorities list for the last two years.[1] Server virtualization is also driving increased use of networked storage to accommodate the advanced functionality of the technology: “purchasing new SAN storage systems” was cited as the number one storage priority. Not far behind in the number three spot was storage virtualization. In an effort to increase their storage efficiencies, companies are virtualizing their storage behind storage arrays (like Hitachi USPV or NetApp Vseries) and at the appliance level (like IBM SVC and EMC VPlex).

These new virtualized environments, while increasingly flexible and agile, are also highly abstracted and even more difficult to manage.  Applications can easily move from one physical server to the next, changing the demands on a storage network. Even the applications themselves can add another layer of abstraction: databases lay down their own file systems (e.g., Oracle ASM) and can obscure the amount of storage being used by management software. Overcoming the complexity created by both of these initiatives will require comprehensive management solutions.

Eventually, the storage environment will have the same levels of virtualization (and abstraction) and storage administrators will need full visibility of not only actual physical storage, but also its relationship to the logical storage presented. Without full visibility into these virtualized environments, new VMs could be contending for space on the same disk or suffering from congestion in the network, creating performance issues.

Given the interdependencies of multiple domains—server, network, and storage—in virtualized environments, it is clear that single domain views are no longer acceptable. In addition to needing that end-to-end visibility, any data collected must be shared across multiple groups within an organization. Many legacy solutions lack sophisticated reporting capabilities, which makes it difficult to share information with other domains. Additionally, many are agent-based, requiring a team of people to deploy and maintain.

Buying Patterns Reflect the Economy

Organizations are also changing the way they justify new IT purchases. While last year, they focused on cost reduction, ESG has seen a recent shift to cost containment. How does that impact SRM purchases? Last year, the top two justifications were saving operational expenses and capital expenses, in that order. This year, operational expenses are still number one, but the number two position has been replaced by business process improvement. Reducing capital expenses has dropped to fifth place (see Figure 2).

Organizations are freeing up capital dollars to make investments that will help to reduce OPEX and improve cycle times for provisioning resources. SRM tools will no longer be able to hang their hats on reducing CAPEX as their main value proposition. Instead, they need to be more focused on helping to reduce operational expenses and ensuring that compute resources can be quickly allocated, reallocated, and optimized.

Given these challenges, organizations should be looking for innovative resource management solutions that provide the requisite visibility, control, and simplicity to empower next generation data centers.

Analysis

In order to overcome these issues and ensure that an SRM solution is not just a cost saving mechanism but also a business enabling solution, any enterprise considering deploying an SRM 2.0 solution should evaluate solutions based on the following criteria:

• Agentless. While steps have been taken to minimize the footprint and compute resources of agents, in order to be quickly deployed, add new items efficiently, and minimize the maintenance and management, new solutions should be taking advantage of agentless technologies like WMI, SSH, SMI, etc.
• Web-based. To facilitate ease of deployment and access, the SRM solution should be web-based and should not rely on a fat-client application to generate reports and information. The information should be accessible using any popular browser.
• Scalable to enterprise levels. Any SRM solution must have the ability to scale into large data centers as well as across multiple data centers worldwide to be a true enterprise solution. The key scalable component of any SRM solution is the database. Ensure that the SRM solution has an enterprise scalable database (e.g., Oracle).
• Cross-domain reporting. A solution should be able to provide an end-to-end view of the storage environment including arrays, fabric, hosts, applications, virtualization, etc.
• Support virtualized environments. As server virtualization continues to proliferate, it is critical that management tools have the requisite visibility into these dynamic environments. This means the ability to trace a data path from the virtual machine through the network and down to the storage arrays.  It’s hard to manage an environment when applications are playing hide and seek.  This also applies to the growing list of storage virtualization solutions. Storage administrators are reluctant to give up control and anything that provides a layer of abstraction is a concern. Solutions that provide a complete view of the physical as well as virtual environment enable storage administrators to make informed decisions. This would apply to both thin provisioning and virtualized storage environments.
• Proactive monitoring & alerting. The solution should have the ability to monitor the storage environment for exceptions or thresholds. When an exception occurs, it should generate an automatic notification via e-mail or SNMP plus have the ability to launch a custom script.
• Customizable reports. Enterprises need to strike a balance between a good selection of out-of-the-box reports and the ability to create unique, specifically tailored reports. Being able to easily create custom reports by accessing the tables of the underlying database that are not exposed in the out-of-the-box reports is essential.
• Multiple reporting and sharing options. Resource management solutions are deployed to collect information and then share it so the correct business decision can be made; decisions like choosing the appropriate tier of storage at the appropriate price point, how to enable just in time delivery of additional storage, and what device to focus on when there is a problem based on what changed.  This information is relevant to more than just the storage team: applications, finance, server, and operations teams are equally interested. Users should have the ability to share information over whatever medium they choose: printed report, webpage, PDF, dashboard, or smartphone. Sharing with external parties is also critical for regulatory compliance when reports are required to be shared with non-IT departments like internal audit committees and external auditing firms.
• Flexible delivery and deployment options. These next generation solutions should be architected so they can be deployed as standard enterprise software solutions or as a service. Let’s face it: no one wants to be a SRM software expert. Rather, users want to be able to leverage the information SRM software provides to make better business decisions. If the intent is to reduce operating costs, the ability to consume SRM as a service that wouldn’t tie up internal resources would be even more attractive. Delivery as a service would also place more emphasis on information reporting and sharing.
• Heterogeneous environment support. IT environments are always under pressure to reduce budgets and organizations acquire or merge with other companies all the time—the result is a mixed environment. Solutions must be able to manage devices from multiple vendors. Also important is the capability to monitor different tiers of devices from even a single vendor. In many cases, legacy solutions require multiple enterprise and mid-tier storage options. Organizations should look for solutions that leverage SMI-S or go beyond it to include additional API integration as SMI-S is still maturing, with different levels of adoption between vendors.
• Seamless integration capabilities with other IT management solutions or frameworks. How easily will SRM tools integrate into existing framework tools? What is the potential to feed information into IT ticketing systems like Remedy?

The Bigger Truth

The time has come to rethink how SRM is used and deployed. IT needs innovative solutions that can keep up with current business demands.  Staff members don’t need to become SRM experts; they need to have access to the right information at the right time so they can make the right decisions. Next generation SRM solutions are poised to play that role; they are adapting to user needs and delivering value, not more complexity.

Organizations are transforming their data centers into dynamic, flexible computing platforms. They require management tools that are easy to deploy and manage, and that provide real value. The next generation of SRM solutions, sometimes referred to as SRM 2.0, are capable of meeting those requirements. The list above should be a starting point for evaluating any current or future solution. It’s not just about CAPEX, OPEX is also important. Deploying a solution that saves a million dollars, but requires a team of 12 to manage, isn’t a long term solution.

via How to choose a storage resource management tool :: SearchStorage.com.au.

This should also play into any future “cloud” strategy that the HP Enterprise Services (ES) may be planning to deliver. Early on, the former EDS team stated that they didn’t know what the HP cloud strategy would be, but it would be hosted in one of its 180 data centers. I expect that the number of data centers will dramatically decrease, but the level of service will increase, even if they are only half as successful as the first initiative.

HP has a history of infusing software into services to help drive automation and so I expect that this effort of consolidating and automating data centers will be a showcase of HP technology wrapped in and managed by HP software. I look forward to hearing about the progress of this project and eventually the end results.

Read  Bob’s other blog entries at Data Center Continuum.

A couple of areas that tend to be overlooked are 1. employees and 2. partners and suppliers. Does your organization’s BC/DR plan include procedures for employees? Perhaps the recent threat of the Swine Flu or its politically correct H1N1 name have prompted organizations to take a closer look at the workforce and identify those personnel responsible for mission critical functions.  Some have taken steps to ensure that these employees could continue to do their jobs–even if forced to work from remote locations for long periods of time.  But what about an organization’s partners and suppliers–how well are they protected and how fast could they recover? How would you find out? In either case,  finding out this information could result in quite lengthy and manual processes.  Wouldn’t be fun the first time you did it and probably wouldn’t get much easier every time after that.

I recently talked with SunGard about some new software modules from their Continuity Management Solutions that are specifically designed to address these needs. Their Vendor and Workforce Assessment modules will allow organizations to quickly create online surveys that can be deployed to all employees and vendors via e-mail. Results are collected and provide insight into gaps that exist and need to be corrected. Examples of these gaps include an employee that doesn’t have a laptop and can’t work from home during severe weather or a supplier that has inadequate protection plans that could jeopardize your organization’s ability to deliver goods or services. Once set up, it could be done on an annual basis to ensure accuracy and that the proper remediation has taken place. Or it can identify a continued weak link in your supply chain that needs to be replaced.

If your organization doesn’t know how well your partners are protected, you may want to consider checking out this software–which can also be consumed via software as a service.

Read Bob’s other blog entries at Data Center Continuum.

This report documents ESG Lab hands-on testing of HP-branded Emulex Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) and explores how a converged infrastructure can enable users to realign traditional technology silos into adaptive pools that can be shared, optimized, and managed as a service.

Background

Organizations are in the process of transforming their data centers into environments that are able to better handle rapidly changing business requirements and unanticipated business needs. In order to meet these objectives, organizations are eliminating their monolithic legacy data centers and infrastructures and replacing them with consolidated, highly virtualized, flexible environments. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), an industry standard protocol (ANSI T11) that maps Fibre Channel (FC) storage traffic over an enhanced 10 Gigabit (10Gb) Ethernet network, is a key technology that will enable that transformation.

FCoE technology has experienced an accelerated development cycle, going from concept to alpha, to beta, and now to second generation production-ready technology in just a few short years. Even more important, it has been tested, “certified,” and is supported by most major vendors. HP’s support will be a critical factor in FCoE adoption as organizations can now take advantage of the technology, knowing their trusted vendor will support it. ESG research[1] indicates that 2010 and 2011 should be significant years for FCoE adoption, as shown in Figure 1. IT professionals surveyed by ESG indicated that 10GbE is poised for 24% growth while FCoE usage looks to expand by 17%. Meanwhile, utilization of traditional Fibre Channel is flattening out.

The increased utilization and enhanced reliability of centrally managed FC storage networks have fueled a massive wave of storage consolidation in recent years. Driven by a set of challenges associated with the cost and complexity of servers, a growing number of organizations are using server virtualization technology to consolidate servers in the data center. As these trends continue, a new wave of I/O or network consolidation, supported by traditional Ethernet-based network traffic and FC-based storage traffic, has begun to take form.

This is to be expected, as the intent of FCoE is not to create yet another separate data center protocol but to merge FC with 10GbE and gracefully migrate from existing FC to Ethernet over time. With organizations looking to reduce operating expenses and accelerate business processes, a converged network enables rapid provisioning of new services and quick, seamless addition of throughput.

Fibre Channel over Ethernet

FCoE maps FC storage traffic over an Ethernet network with the goal of converging storage and networking traffic onto a single platform leveraging familiar management tools, security models, and processes. Switches and server-based adapters supporting FCoE are being evaluated by a growing number of organizations interested in the potential benefits of FCoE technology.

The Data Center Bridging (DCB) standard (a.k.a., Data Center Ethernet or Converged Enhanced Ethernet) was defined to enable the converged approach shown in Figure 2.  One of the key features of Enhanced Ethernet is its ability to differentiate between and prioritize different types of traffic sharing a common physical layer (a.k.a., Quality of Service, or QoS). The DCB standard also supports link-level flow control and end-to-end congestion management to meet the lossless performance requirements of mission critical applications currently relying on FC for networked storage connectivity.

The FCoE standard picks up everything from the FC standard—except the cabling and the physical interface—and places it on top of an DCB Ethernet network.  It was approved within the T11 committee in June, 2009.  FCoE has the potential to reduce data center complexity by reducing the number of cards, cabling, and network devices in the data center. Combining FC and Ethernet onto a single card, a Converged Network Adapter (CNA) replaces the need for separate network interface cards (NICs) and FC host bus adapters (HBAs) while allowing organizations to replace separate edge or top-of-rack Ethernet and Fibre-Channel switches with DCB multiprotocol switches supporting Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity.

Consolidation and virtualization are the key data center initiatives for transitioning from existing, segregated, LAN/SAN infrastructure to more efficient, converged architecture. The ultimate goal of network convergence is to provide the foundation for a truly agile end-to-end infrastructure while achieving significant reductions in capital equipment and operational expenses.

HP CN1000E Dual Port CNA

The HP CN1000E Dual Port CNA, seen in Figure 3, provides LAN and SAN connectivity over 10GbE network using FCoE and DCB functionality. The CN1000E has a PCIe Gen 2 X8 connection for server-side communication and two ports of 10Gbps Ethernet connectivity for network and storage connectivity.

HP CN1000E Dual Port CNAs and Emulex FC HBAs share a common FC driver stack and both can be managed with the Emulex OneCommand Manager application, this is especially important to administrators with an installed base of Fibre Channel HBAs. Both also support N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), which provides virtualized addressing and zoning for enhanced security in server virtualization environments. Leveraging a proven heritage and a common tool set, HP CNAs are designed to enable consolidation, energy conservation, and savings.

ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on testing of the HP CN1000E at Hewlett Packard’s facility in Marlborough, MA. ESG tested the CNA’s ability to provide transparent network and storage connectivity for industry standard HP ProLiant servers. ESG Lab also looked at the management capabilities of the OneCommand Manager application.

Getting Started

The ESG Lab test bed consisted of servers, network switches, and storage as might be found in a typical data center.[2] Two physical servers were running Microsoft Windows Server 2008. One server was configured to represent existing FC attached servers in a traditional data center setup as seen in Figure 4, with an 8Gb FC HBA attached to an HP StorageWorks 8/24 FC SAN switch as well as a 1-Gb Ethernet NIC attached to an HP ProCurve 1-Gb Ethernet switch. The second server was configured with a single HP CN1000E Dual Port CNA attached to an HP StorageWorks 2408 Converged Network Switch for converged network and storage connectivity. Both servers were presented storage from an HP StorageWorks EVA 4400 FC storage array.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab first examined the procedures required to incorporate the CNA and FCoE into an existing FC environment, including the configuration of both the CN1000E and the Converged Network Switch. ESG Lab referred to the HP StorageWorks SAN Design Reference Guide[3] periodically throughout the installation process. It contains detailed information about HP SAN architecture, including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, FCoE, SAN extension, and hardware interoperability.

First, ESG Lab downloaded the CNA driver package and then the OneCommand Manager application, installing them both on the DL385 G6 server where the CN1000E CNA was physically installed. The drivers and software are easy to find in the storage networking section of the HP website. The entire process, from the first mouse click on HP’s website through downloading and installing both the drivers and the OneCommand Manager—including rebooting after installing the drivers and software—took nine minutes. Once the driver package and OneCommand Manager were installed, OneCommand Manager was used to configure the CN1000E. As can be seen in Figure 5, the CNA was displayed along with the existing traditional FC HBA and showed both an Ethernet NIC and an FCoE adapter on port 1.

Additional tabs in the CN1000E provide configuration and verification of FCoE-specific parameters. The CEE tab, for example, shows Data Center Bridging state and mode as well as priority group properties as seen in Figure 6. Priority groups are configured on the Converged Network Switch and allow administrators to set bandwidth allocation for Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic to ensure that both protocols can get the bandwidth required by applications.

Configuration of both FC storage and Ethernet networking was exactly the same as with traditional FC adapters and Ethernet NICs.  FC zoning of the HP 2408 DCB switch for FCoE connectivity was also familiar, using exactly the same process as for traditional FC SANs, as seen in Figure 7.

ESG Lab measured less than 15 minutes from the first mouse click to formatting FC SAN attached storage volumes on the FCoE attached server.

Ease of Management

The FCoE specification was defined with ease of integration with existing FC networks in mind. Bridged FCoE support can be used to add new servers to a converged 10GbE fabric while existing investments in FC switches and storage systems are preserved. Bandwidth allocation and management with priority groups is designed to ensure applications have the bandwidth they require, regardless of protocol.
HP takes ease of integration further with the HP SmartStart utility, delivered with HP ProLiant ML and DL  series servers and supporting HP ProLiant BL blade servers to provide step-by-step server deployment assistance. From array configuration and OS installation to the update of optimized ProLiant server support software, SmartStart helps administrators ensure a stable and reliable configuration.

ESG Lab Testing

To validate the interoperability and manageability of the CN1000E Dual Port CNA in an enterprise Fibre Channel SAN environment, ESG Lab ran several IO tests using the test bed shown in Figure 8.

ESG Lab tested dynamic bandwidth allocation using priority groups on the HP 2408 switch. Dynamic bandwidth allocation enables administrators to assign and re-assign bandwidth to applications on the fly, between the FC and Ethernet domains.  This provides more flexibility than is possible with separate FC and Ethernet networks, where additional bandwidth can only be achieved by adding adapters or HBAs and bandwidth cannot be shared across domains.

Priority groups were configured to guarantee 90% of available bandwidth to FC traffic and 10% to Ethernet. A SANBlaze RAM-based storage emulator was used to provide access to storage volumes at line-rate speeds over both 8-Gb Fibre Channel and 10Gb FCoE. An HP DL360 was used to provide 10Gb network connectivity, SAN traffic was generated using Medusa Labs test tools, and IP traffic was generated using the Iometer load generation utility.

First, ESG Lab ran a baseline test on the server with the traditional 8Gb FC HBA and a 1-Gb NIC installed. As seen in Figure 9, the speedometer from the Medusa Labs suite in the lower right showed that the FC HBA was reading at 773.27 MB/sec and the speedometer from the Iometer tool  in the Upper left showed that the 1-Gb NIC was reading at 112.82 MB/sec., both very near-line speeds.

Next, the same workloads were run on the CNA-attached server. The results are shown in Figure 10. FC traffic is getting almost precisely 90% of the total bandwidth and Ethernet traffic is getting the remaining 10%.

With the workloads still running, ESG Lab changed the priority group settings in the HP 2408 switch to re-allocate bandwidth. With two commands, allocation was changed to 50% for FCoE and 50% for LAN. Immediately after ‘Enter’ was pressed, the traffic pattern changed to what is seen in Figure 11, with no disruption or interruption to IO. At that point in time, FCoE traffic was getting 51% of the total bandwidth and LAN traffic was getting the remaining 49%.

Using a simple, single command, ESG Lab was able to dynamically re-allocate bandwidth from FCoE to LAN, with no disruption to service.

The Bottom Line

Organizations of all sizes are struggling to deliver IT services to meet the rapidly changing needs of the business. Data growth is unrelenting and IT budgets are constantly under scrutiny, so in order to meet increasingly demanding service levels, IT managers are looking for opportunities to consolidate. In order for this to be effective, IT not only needs to reduce capital costs, but more importantly needs to reduce operational costs, enhance scalability and performance, and improve cycle times. Server virtualization is one technology that meets these requirements and it therefore continues to be a top IT initiative. HP’s converged network offering also delivers these benefits by leveraging consolidated management using simple, familiar tools, reduced  hardware and cabling requirements, strong performance, and lower power and cooling requirements.

ESG Lab created a simple cost of implementation model based on a typical data center environment with a requirement to add 100 new servers to an existing environment with a 4Gb FC SAN infrastructure and 1Gb LAN distribution.  ESG Lab chose to make the comparison using 4Gb FC because it fits better with where most users environments are today.  In the data center, 4Gb FC is much more common than 8Gb.

Costs were broken down into two major categories:  capital expenditures including switches, NICs, and HBAs as well as cables, and operational expenses including power and cooling as well as cable installation.  Hardware costs were calculated using online pricing from HP and other major vendors, power requirements were taken from hardware manufacturers’ specification sheets, and operational expenses were estimated based on interviews and conversations with IT managers responsible for managing large enterprise data centers.[5]

Figure 12 shows the relative capital expense a typical end-user would incur to implement 100 servers with a traditional combination of 4Gbps Fibre Channel SAN and Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure versus implementing 100 servers using a single, converged network with 10GbE and FCoE.

Figure 13 shows the annual power and cooling expenses for the switching and network adapters in both scenarios.

Table 1 shows the detailed results of ESG Lab’s calculations, with cost savings broken out by category.

What the Numbers Mean

• Consolidating to a 10Gb converged network infrastructure resulted in significant cost savings in both capital and operational expenditures compared to a traditional LAN/SAN infrastructure.
• Operational expenses such as power/cooling and cable plant maintenance showed significantly higher cost savings over the cost of switches and adapters due to the large reduction in cabling and number of switches. As the environment scales over time, these savings can really add up.

ESG Lab Validation Highlights

• The HP CN1000E Dual Port CNA was recognized by both OneCommand Manager and Windows as a FC HBA and a 10GbE NIC, without any special software or configuration required.
• The CNA used the same lpfc drivers as all standard Emulex FC HBAs.
• The management experience administering the CNA is essentially identical to any HP-branded Emulex FC HBA.
• The CNA was able to participate in a Fibre Channel fabric with 8Gb FC HBAs and share the same storage array without any compatibility or interoperability issues.
• The priority groups feature on the HP 2408 Converged Network Switch was able to allocate bandwidth between FC and Ethernet applications precisely and on the fly, with no disruption or interruption in service.
• ESG Lab estimated that an organization can use FCoE to add new servers to their existing FC SANs with minimal added cost of acquisition, with no additional administration costs, and with fewer cables, adapters, and switches to power, cool, and manage.

Issues to Consider

• While the T11 committee has approved the FCoE standard and sent it up for public review, the DCB or Enhanced Ethernet standards are still being ratified. Having said that, forward thinking IT managers with existing investment in FC fabrics would be wise to begin investigating this technology sooner rather than later.
• Upgrading from traditional FC to FCoE in one fell swoop is potentially problematic, requiring replacement of SAN and network switches as well as HBAs. The good news is that FCoE, deployed in its most likely scenario—when adding new servers—integrates seamlessly into existing SAN and LAN environments without having to replace existing FC infrastructure. As that SAN and LAN infrastructure ages and needs to be replaced, users migrate to FCoE organically.
• While administration and troubleshooting should be easier with a single console for both FC and Ethernet connectivity as well as fewer cards and cables, there are potential conflicts of IT culture: joining the FC and Ethernet networking teams together.

The Bigger Truth

As organizations continue to transform their data centers and server virtualization continues to proliferate, servers, storage, and networking devices must be added to keep pace with business demands. As a result, businesses are spending upwards of 70% of their IT budgets on operations.

In a recent ESG survey,[6] 54% of IT managers polled indicated their organizations would be basing new technology decisions based on their ability to reduce operational costs and 42% indicated improving business processes would be their most important criteria. Converged networks should be an attractive solution for IT departments looking to reduce footprint and complexity in the data center while streamlining administration. It should be noted that in this same survey, reducing capital costs went from tied for second place in 2009 down to fifth place in 2010. ESG has had numerous conversations with organizations that validate this research, with some organizations stating they can get all the capital they need—provided they can show it will help to reduce operational expenses.

ESG Lab found that a converged infrastructure enables users to reduce both capital and operational expenses while increasing flexibility and service levels with a simplified architecture. Fewer network switches, cards, and cables, with more efficient silicon technology, result in less power being consumed and less heat generated while administrative burdens are reduced with far fewer devices and connections to manage.

Leveraging familiar tools and processes, DCB and FCoE provide a smooth upgrade path for the migration of storage traffic from an isolated FC storage network to a converged Ethernet fabric. It is ESG Lab’s opinion that FCoE is a compelling technology and potentially a better fit than iSCSI for organizations with significant existing investment in Fibre Channel. It enables companies to retain existing FC infrastructure, keeps existing FC management tools in place, provides the same level of performance guarantees, and has the potential of reducing costs. This final consideration of cost is a significant variable in the FCoE adoption equation. Given the present economy and the pressure IT is under to reduce costs, compelling FCoE pricing could be used to accelerate adoption faster than any marketing pitch or certification.

ESG Lab has seen FCoE in action, with HP CN1000E CNAs providing converged server connectivity to a LAN and a SAN. Running alongside HP-branded Emulex HBAs and managed from the familiar Emulex OneCommand Manager application, HP CNAs worked with field-proven drivers and tools. Tens of thousands of customers have taken advantage of HPs decades of IT experience to deploy rock solid FC and iSCSI SANs. HP’s CNA provides the flexibility to choose not only the right protocol, but also the right performance and price point to address changing business needs.

ESG believes that organizations should take a good, long look at this architecture and consider how they could benefit from building highly flexible compute resource pools that can adapt to multiple network technologies—without requiring significant moves, adds, or changes. Simply put, network convergence makes sense. If you don’t have to have more than one network, why would you? This type of cost savings and flexibility should be well received by organizations planning their data center transformations.

Appendix

[2] Complete configuration details can be found in the Appendix.

[3] http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00403562/c00403562.pdf?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

[4] Source: ESG Research Report, Global Green IT Priorities: Beyond Data Center Power and Cooling, November 2008.

[5] Assumptions and Parameters can be found in the Appendix.

[6] Source: ESG Research Report, 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2010.

[7] As of Dec. 09 according to the US Energy Information administration http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html