Emerging IEEE Ethernet standards could soothe data center headaches

Even as Cisco, HP and others are increasingly invading each other’s turf in the data center, they are also joining forces to push through new Ethernet standards that could greatly ease management of those increasingly virtualized IT nerve centers.

The IEEE 802.1Qbg and 802.1Qbh specifications are designed to address serious management issues raised by the explosion of virtual machines in data centers that traditionally have been the purview of physical servers and switches. In a nutshell, the emerging standards would offload significant amounts of policy, security and management processing from virtual switches on network interface cards (NIC) and blade servers and put it back onto physical Ethernet switches connecting storage and compute resources.

The IEEE draft standards boast a feature called Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregation (VEPA), an extension to physical and virtual switching designed to eliminate the large number of switching elements that need to be managed in a data center. Adoption of the specs would make management easier for server and network administrators by requiring fewer elements to manage, and fewer instances of element characteristics -- such as switch address tables, security and service attribute policies, and configurations -- to manage.