Data Center I/O Consolidation: From Ethernet in the Data Center to a Data Center Over Ethernet

The "Data center network" is a myth. For nearly as long as there has been Data Centers (DC), there have been several DC networks that interact with and overlap one another, most importantly the data, storage and High-Performance Compute (HPC) networks. The desire to consolidate these networks onto a single fabric is as old as the networks themselves. As network vendors continue to reengineer and ramp up production of 10G Ethernet equipment, the promise of unifying data, HPC and storage networks onto a common technology - Ethernet - increases. Network vendors have some significant technical and engineering hurdles to clear before they can simultaneously meet the opposing pulls of storage, which demands lossless reliability, and high-performance applications, which demand very high throughput.