The network behind the new data center

From data center to data edge Blade servers

As the song goes, "you gotta have heart." But a strong ticker is no good without healthy veins and arteries. None of that will do much good without some brains.

The same is true for the new corporate data center: Advanced computing power at the heart of a company can be wasted if network bandwidth, intelligence and traffic control are not optimized. A brainier infrastructure can make networks, data centers and storage act as a unified system, and allow information to travel more efficiently for on-demand applications.

Cisco CEO John Chambers recently painted a picture of this future: "Networking opens up many opportunities in the data center, where devices will tie together in ways they haven't before," he said at a December analyst conference. He described how networks would be tightly integrated with computing resources with the goal of making transparent where storage, servers and data applications reside. "That is tailor-made for networking," he said.

Arriving at this networking transparency will take technologies such as Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS), intelligent traffic management and acceleration, and the integration of storage-area networks (SAN) and LANs. And the ever-growing need for bandwidth within data centers, coupled with falling Gigabit prices, will drive an uptake in 10G Ethernet as the backbone technology of choice, says Jay Pultz, a research vice president at Gartner. Big bandwidth never goes out of style, he adds.

Certainly researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a lab run by the University of California and the Department of Energy in Livermore, Calif., agree. As LLNL migrates from monolithic supercomputing platforms with large symmetric multiprocessing machines to clusters of commodity-based servers in its data center, it has found network upgrades necessary as well. Deploying large server clusters, each with 1G bit/sec network connections, has pushed the lab to use Cisco 10G Ethernet switches as the core backbone technology, says Dave Wiltzius, network division leader at LLNL.

Additionally, the lab is testing 10G server adapters and hopes to have some server clusters running at 10G soon, he says. (The hundreds of two- and four-way clusters of Intel/Linux boxes are proving to be as powerful as and less costly than traditional supercomputing machines.)

Other network topology changes will come in the distribution layer, consisting of server connections and switches that aggregate LAN traffic at the network's edge. The ability to plug desktop switches and servers directly into the 10G core will give LLNL cost and operational advantages, Wiltzius says. "It could help us optimize [the distribution layer] of the network and get rid of different types of bottlenecks," he says.

Along with this new data center architecture, Wiltzius and his staff are looking to make the network a more virtually configurable asset. For this, LLNL has tapped MPLS, a Layer 3 quality-of-service standard that lets packets be tagged, routed and shaped as individual flows across an IP network. MPLS, which LLNL is turning on now in its core switches, will let the lab more easily slice up, prioritize and secure the torrents of traffic running across the 10G backbone. MPLS also will let LLNL create miniature labs and data centers virtually and on the fly, using the giant pool of bandwidth in the network core.