The data center isn’t just a collection of networks, servers, storage and software but an IT “ecosystem” delivering applications and services to users wherever they are located, with a high degree of reliability, consistency and security. Today’s data center is being called upon to empower end-users, improve collaboration, increase global availability and facilitate regulatory compliance. However, operational challenges such as power and cooling, asset utilization, provisioning, security threats and business continuance are limiting IT’s ability to respond to these business pressures.
“Many of today’s data centers are filled to capacity with ‘racked-and-stacked’ boxes, trapped storage and a proliferation of dedicated-function appliances — all connected by a ‘cable jungle’ that impairs reliability, manageability and airflow,” said FusionStorm CTO Vince Conroy. “IT teams are pressed for time and resources due to a lack of system interoperability, limited management tools and the ever-broadening learning curve. Security threats and compliance requirements put even further demands on IT.
“At FusionStorm, our goal is to help organizations create a Business-Optimized Data Center capable of delivering diverse, Web-centric applications and reducing operational costs. The Business-Optimized Data Center enables adaptable services, scalable performance, automated operations, energy conservation, security and compliance through best-of-breed tools and FusionStorm’s ‘360 Services.’”
This series of articles focuses on FusionStorm’s vision of the Business-Optimized Data Center and the solutions and strategies that help make it possible.
Application performance, security threats, ever-increasing storage capacity — given all the IT challenges facing today’s organizations, the core network infrastructure often gets overlooked. However, experts now say that as many as half of all organizations will need major infrastructure upgrades over the next two years in order to support growing IT demands.
That’s because the network is being called upon to support more users and more types of applications across an increasingly mobile and geographically dispersed environment. Organizations looking to leverage the familiar network architecture to quickly respond to changing business requirements must ensure that they have the data transport mechanisms in place to handle the job.
“The network has become the core foundation of business — virtually everything runs over the network,” said Vince Conroy, CTO, FusionStorm. “Where basic network connectivity once sufficed, organizations now have much more complex requirements, including convergence, storage networking and virtualization. The network has to evolve along with the rest of your IT infrastructure.”
Conroy says now is the time for organizations to begin deploying a virtualized 10 Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure. Network virtualization enables organizations to consolidate network appliances, better utilize hardware resources and bandwidth, and create a flexible, scalable infrastructure that’s easier to manage.
“With network virtualization you get integrated switching, firewall, IDS and application service modules — all on a 10 Gigabit network core,” said Conroy. “This is the vision of the future, and Cisco is delivering it today.”
Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Virtual Switching System (VSS)1440, enabled by the Virtual Switching Supervisor Engine 720 with 10 Gigabit Ethernet, effectively combines multiple Catalyst 6500 switches into a single logical device for faster failover and easier management. What’s more, Cisco’s architectural approach is designed to unify all components of the data center, dramatically improving flexibility, availability, performance and management while reducing power consumption.
The VSS 1440 scales system bandwidth capacity to as much as 1.44 terabits per second (Tbps) by activating all available bandwidth across two Catalyst 6500 switches. It also simplifies operational management by enabling multiple Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches to share a single point of management, single routing instance and single IP address, as well as eliminating the dependence on spanning-tree and first-hop redundancy protocols like the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP).
Cisco VSS 1440 boosts nonstop communications by delivering deterministic, sub-second Layer 2 link recovery through inter-chassis stateful failovers and the predictable resilience of multi-chassis Etherchannel technology. In addition, it provides investment protection by offering two times the previous scalability plus higher availability.
“Cisco has raised the flagship Catalyst 6500 Series platform to the next level with VSS 1440, enabling existing Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series switching investments and multilayer switching architectures to be enhanced with virtualization capabilities,” Conroy said. “The Catalyst 6500 Virtual Switching System provides customers with a smooth migration into a new era of data center networking.”