Taking Convergence To The Next Level

By Mike McNamara, FCIA marketing chairperson, NetApp Product Marketing

The widespread economic slowdown has created a business environment that demands that IT increase flexibility, efficiency, and performance—without adding costs. Virtualization is the first wave in a series of sweeping changes to data center architecture to do just that. Virtualized server and storage infrastructures consolidate physically separated resources into a single virtual pool to improve utilization, simplify management, and offer significant savings in both capital and operational expenses. Virtualization of desktops, servers, and storage cost-effectively eliminates many inefficiencies in traditional data center architectures.

As effective as these strategies are for increasing efficiency, there is still room for improvement. Many enterprise data centers deploy an Ethernet network for IP traffic and a Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) for block-mode SCSI traffic. As these data centers deploy virtualized infrastructures, zones of virtualization are created around these different networks.

Deploying and managing two distinct networks results in high capital and operational costs. Each infrastructure has its own underutilized and captive storage. Each requires its own data recovery solutions and data management tools. After the hardware, software, and cabling are purchased and installed, two independent and specialized teams are often needed to manage the different networks. The two-network model consumes a large number of network ports, and carries high ongoing operational costs as a result of numerous protocol-specific adapters and switches to power, cool, and house the infrastructure.