Data center fabric

A data center fabric describes the hardware, software, and technology infrastructure required to power data centers. New and emerging business requirements drive IT organizations to evolve their technology infrastructures, fueling an ongoing transformation of data centers, including:
* Optimization of resource utilization to reduce cost
* Increase in the amount of digital information assets organizations can leverage for a competitive advantage
* Simplification of application deployment and data management to keep up with the speed of business transformation

Today’s competitive business environment demands that applications are continuously available and that all data is accessible, protected, and managed at the lowest possible cost. This is a growing challenge, especially as the amount of information being converted into digital data continues to rise. Moreover, global competition means that business strategies are more dynamic as supply chains become more flexible and regional variations in products and processes are required to gain a competitive advantage.

Data centers circa 2007

Today's data centers are hard-pressed to keep up with the rate of growth in digital data and the pace of application deployment. This is especially challenging as organizations attempt to turn their data centers into strategic assets. Because of the unprecedented growth of digital data, infrastructure performance, availability, and scalability have become essential to success. And, with the mandate to reduce risk and complexity, organizations need infrastructure components that are more tightly integrated under a common management framework.

As a result, enterprise data centers are undergoing a distinct architectural transformation. Important elements of the new data center architecture will most likely include:
* Consolidation of physical resources into shared resource pools
* Replacement of rigid, physical connections between applications and data with dynamic, virtual connections using virtual servers and storage
* Enhanced data mobility, protection, and security
* Improved cost and energy efficiency

Key requirements for infrastructure transformation

Organizations need highly flexible IT infrastructures that are capable of meeting rising scalability and performance demands. Because most organizations have invested millions of dollars in their enterprise data centers, they must be able to leverage their existing assets as they build their next-generation fabrics. To reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), the data center fabric must support unified management of applications, files, storage, and servers in a non-disruptive manner. It must also be efficient in regard to power and cooling, to support ongoing efforts to green the data canter.

A fundamental guiding force behind data center transformation is consolidation, first enabled through storage consolidation and wide utilization of Storage Area Networks (SANs). Today, server consolidation, fueled by the capabilities and cost savings of server virtualization, is requiring a fundamental change in fabrics supporting hundreds to thousands of virtual machines. And to achieve even greater management and energy efficiencies, organizations need to consolidate smaller SANs into ever-larger SANs.

The core of the data center requires a highly connected fabric that is reliable, secure, and adaptive to change. It must be optimized to facilitate and support expanding virtual server environments. It must leverage intelligence in the fabric to provide services with increased application awareness. Finally, it must provide a high degree of automation based on application-driven policies.

Characteristics of data center fabrics

* Data-centric and application-aware
* Highly connected
* Consolidated
* Virtualized
* Intelligent and adaptive
* Efficient with unified management
* Secure to protect digital assets
* Energy-efficient