White Papers: Storage

The data center has gone through several major evolutionary changes over the past several decades, and each change has been defined by major shifts in computing. The shift to a virtual data center will be the single biggest transition in the history of computing. This transition will reshape all the major data center tiers: applications, storage, servers and the network. This paper examines the drivers of this transition, provides real-world case studies and includes data centre fabric best practices.

Low cost servers, used for applications such as sales force automation and workgroup collaboration, had contributed to server sprawl, causing the data center to outgrow available power and cooling capacity. Server virtualisation helped but had begun to slow network performance. “We wanted 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity without the expense of building a new data center,” says Rory Regan, network and telecom manager, Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated. “We decided to build a new data center network that would continue to work with our existing servers and storage as we gradually migrated to a unified fabric.” Read this case study

Agility, or business flexibilty, and low cost TCO have become equally important to companies that will succeed in a changing global marketplace. Read on.

This paper describes the principles of the new, commercially available data centre architecture that can be implemented today to dramatically improve the electrical efficiency of data centres.