Tag fcoe

Hey guys! I bet you’re wondering the very same thing a lot of people wonder.  And chances are you did a search (as I had in the past) with the very same query as this title.   And chances are.. you’d end up with a page filled with OMFG irrelevant data, when all you want to know is; WILL ORANGE CABLE DO 10G, WHY ARE ALL MY CABLES BLUE NOW?!’  Etc.. :)

So, in the effort of full disclosure and thanks to my good friend Stuart Miniman, I’m publishing this post here, containing everything you actually care about!

Published in this lovely slide share; Converged Networks: FCoE, iSCSI and the Future of Storage Networking is a beautiful slide like this, but the real core and important bit is.

Orange Fiber Cable DOES 10g, but only up to 82m

Blue (Aqua) Fiber Cable is ALSO 10g, at lengths of up to 300m

By the looks of things though, when it comes to the days of 40g or 100g, Orange cable will not exactly be your best friend in those scenarios; a good problem to have at that point.

So, when you’re going through your datacenter and doing short-haul in a cabinet and saying “doh! we need to rip out all of this orange so we can to 10g”.. Don’t.   If you’re running long haul or to a cabinet pretty far away, sure make sure it’s blue all day long but you will be fine in the short term if you’re doing short runs.

Hopefully you found this useful (let me know if so) because I’m sick and tired of trying to remember what this is and end up at a million pages telling me EVERY detail but this! :)

Welcome to the Future! Strangely the future hasn’t ever felt so much like “Now” than ever before.    If you haven’t been following all of the chatter leading up to these major announcements we’re on the threshhold of these major breaking points like never before.

The Data center has spoken and it’s answer is True unification.

Cisco has had this same story with their Switch line and with the purely unified solution with the Nexus line and the future of FCoE.   This is not just another story of “Let’s produce another server” which is akin to the type of “battles” you tend to see occur between Dell, HP and IBM.  No this is something much more and much bigger.   So, while this definitely is an introduction of Blade Servers, this is more than just “another blade”.   This is an entirely new way to think about, to manage and to interoperate within your datacenter.

If you haven’t seen some of the snippets of the new blades coming, here are a few pictures.

This is more than just pretty pictures.  Never before have we had such a consolidated solution to a Network Fabric akin to the consolidated SAN solutions which NetApp has Pioneered and still stands unopposed in delivering.   Add to that the pure play with VMware and other virtualization and what we have here is a marriage of Servers with the Networks and the Storage; what you end up with an end-to-end virtualization and delivery solution which will comprehensively change the way the datacenter operates.

So, what does this mean for the future?   The landscape has gotten a bit wider and narrower at the same time.    Everyone will have their toe dipped in this pool, or wanting to be a part of it, but those who will stand strong are the ones who speak to this same story of Unity.   Doing more with less (Less Operating Systems, Less Platforms, Less Management required)

Even with the Cloud looming over our heads, the Datacenter isn’t getting any smaller, it is simply getting better at doing what it’s supposed to do.  Either you become better with it, or start working on that resume.

Firstly, let me commend Beth Pariseau for this great article and interview with Fusion-io, including the deep-dive discussions with them!

Now that the formalities are out of the way… time to be not so nice ;)

I like the idea of the Fusion-io devices, I even mentioned them last June, so I’ll call it like it is!

What Fusion-io brings to the table is indeed a nice comprehensive solution to provide high-speed data access in a very small foot-print.  This is indeed a fact, I’m sure none of us will argue that they are indeed providing you to have very FAST storage operating in a distributed model, which works out perfectly in a one-off scenario in ways hard to even address!

The business challenges which Fusion-io solves is the difficulty of getting high-speed disk closer to very specific applications (such as grid-computing in ‘x’ number of boxes or OLTP) and it does a pretty good job of that, allowing me to insert their solution into my existing commodity servers!

However, for the one challenge this solution solves it still leaves all of the other pressing issues as this forces us into a distributed fashion, almost contradicting the consolidation efforts which Virtualization, FCoE and and Virtualized storage bring into the Datacenter.

So, I commend the effort, however the implementation of distribution not only increases my risk but it raises question of my scalability of this as a long-term viable implementation.   Here’s a top down list of challenges addressed and non-addressed with this implementation.

Infact, when you think about it, the Fusion-io introduction is a clear replacement for DAS in the current datacenter, but it lags so behind conventional (and even archaic) models of SAN implementations that it’d be hard-pressed for any Data Center or Enterprise Architect to use this in any extensive deployment with the lack of scalability, DR/BC sensitivity, HA application and short and long-term backup and archival.

On it’s own, it’s a challenge to see it last and take a significant portion of the Enterprise Storage market as a whole but as a niche player it is king.   With offerings like TMS – RAMSAN, the NetApp V-Series RAMSAN Bundle, and other SSD/EFD solutions premiered by the larger storage vendors this will not only continue to be an aggressive play in the future but will set a precedent of things to come.

It just goes to show, storage is dumb – It is how you use it and the intelligence into managing it which is the clear differentiator, and these differentiators will set the dogs apart from the wolves. (or lolcats if preferred)