Unified Networking with Intel® Ethernet Lowers Costs by Simplifying Data Topologies

Reduce the complexity of your data center environment by combining LAN and SAN traffic onto a single Ethernet fabric. Connect servers to network storage over 10 Gigabit Intel® Ethernet connections, instead of a dedicated storage network.

Intel's unified networking solutions enable cost-effective connectivity to the SAN; customers can use NAS, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to carry storage traffic over Ethernet. In order to meet SAN requirements for guaranteed delivery without dropped packets, the topology uses a suite of industry-standard technologies known as data center bridging.

Enhanced Ethernet delivers lossless SAN traffic

Conventional Ethernet does not guarantee successful data delivery, which is not acceptable for SAN traffic. Ethernet enhancements such as data center bridging overcome that limitation with technologies that guarantee lossless delivery.

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• Enhanced transmission selection allocates bandwidth among different traffic classes to help ensure appropriate priority and latency for traffic that requires it.
• Priority flow control allows certain traffic types to be prioritized over others, so for example, FCoE traffic can be transmitted in a lossless fashion.

FCoE combines SANs and LANs

An FCoE-capable edge switch (no core switch changes are necessary) passes Fibre Channel payload encapsulated in Ethernet frames. That reduces the number of network ports by as much as half, since dedicated Fibre Channel ports to the host are not needed.

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• Lower equipment costs and complexity result from reduced switch port and network interface requirements.
• Reduced power and cooling costs are enabled by fewer host bus adapters and Fibre Channel switches.
• Unified management lets FCoE use existing Fibre Channel management infrastructure.

10 Gigabit Ethernet delivers high throughput

10 Gigabit Intel® Ethernet Server Adapters for PCI Express* are designed to meet the throughput requirements of bandwidth-hungry implementations, such as those associated with unified data center fabric.

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• Multi-core processor-readiness includes the ability to scale I/O data processing across multiple CPU cores for more efficient performance.
• Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) for Connectivity (Intel® VT-c) enhances application and workload response times on a virtualized system by reducing I/O bottlenecks and improving I/O performance.
• Unified networking simplifies network infrastructure by allowing LAN, SAN, and IPC traffic to share the same data center fabric.