Ethernet Fabric: Lowering barriers to the private cloud

Traditional datacentre architectures were not designed for the stresses put on them by virtualisation and private cloud technologies

This web seminar is now available to watch on-demand

Traditional datacentre architectures were simply not designed for the stresses put on them by virtualisation and private cloud technologies. They are being pushed to the limit and found wanting. Once again, the network is becoming the bottleneck.

Throwing bandwidth at the problem helps. However, it does not address issues of latency or the limitations of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) used on tiered datacentre networks to eliminate multiple paths.

Other solutions must be found. One proposal is to abandon the conventional hierarchical network in favour of a flatter architecture where everything in the datacentre – servers, gateways, storage, etc. – is connected to a single fabric of Layer 2 Ethernet switches.

Standards that will enable such Ethernet fabrics to be built are now generally agreed. The first products that support flatter networks have been released by leading enterprise networking vendors, and there have been impressive claims about the impact they can have on the performance, scalability and management of the virtualised datacentre.

Speakers for the web seminar include:

Clive Longbottom, service director, business process facilitation, Quocirca
Chris Middleton, consulting editor, Computing
Alan Murphy, Brocade Communications
Stuart Sumner, chief reporter, Computing

Click here to view the web seminar.