Planning for Converged Fabrics: The Next Step in Data Center Evolution

Over the past decade, almost every industry has witnessed increasing demands for compute capacity and an exponential growth of data, which has resulted in complex and expensive IT infrastructures that are not only cumbersome to deploy, but also to administer and maintain. To counter these increasing demands and complexity in data center infrastructures, as well as to improve utilization, efficiency, and security, there has been greater emphasis on server virtualization and infrastructure consolidation.

The goal of this IBM® Redpaper™ document is to highlight some of the important challenges currently faced in the IT industry with infrastructure growth, and to outline the need for . We introduce the emerging IT standards for convergence such as Convergence Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). We describe many of the available products and solutions enabling converged fabrics, such as Converged Network Adapters and Converged Fabrics switches that IBM along with business partners such as Panduit are bringing to market.

We continue the discussion by describing the elements of physical deployment planning of convergence technologies, and discuss various scenarios that demonstrate transitioning from traditional to converged infrastructures while following the best practices.

This paper is aimed at data center managers and others who are involved with the planning, implementation, and maintenance of infrastructure in the IT environment.

November 2012 update: Minor update

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Solutions
Chapter 3. Benefits and business impact

Related product families

Product families related to this document are the following:

• Network Management