Mixing Gigabit Ethernet And 10 Gigabit Ethernet In A Dedicated SAN Infrastructure

By Tony Ansley

The recent availability of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) and the expected enhanced Ethernet standards such as Data Center Bridging (DCB) present an opportunity for administrators to transition to a consolidated Ethernet infrastructure. The reference architecture illustrated in this article shows how enterprises may make the transition to 10GbE for storage using Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS Series arrays and Dell PowerConnect™ switches.

As organizations transition to 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) technology, the proposed Data Center Bridging (DCB) specification is expected to provide a unified network fabric. These advances can enhance the network storage infrastructure by helping to simplify inefficient deployments of Ethernet adapters, Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), and cabling that populate many data centers today. Moving to an infrastructure that mixes Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 10GbE switches with Dell EqualLogic PS Series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays enables administrators deploying Dell iSCSI storage to incrementally integrate servers and storage with 10GbE network access as they become available while maintaining legacy GbE hosts and storage.