When rolling out UC, don't forget the impact on data center storage
As with most great fables, the story of convergence begins with the words “once upon a time”: Once upon a time there were three networks: one for data, one for voice, and one for video…
The moral of this particular story has been: With the advent of VoIP and UC, converging three enterprise networks onto one data network can save costs and increase agility.
But what about inside the data center? Increasingly, companies are situating their VoIP and UC servers into consolidated (or even outsourced) data centers. Does convergence work as well inside the data center as across the WAN?
In a word, no. Most organizations still deploy at least two kinds of network: TCP/IP over Ethernet for data, and Fibre Channel (FC) for block storage. IT wants to converge networks to simplify them, and ultimately to reduce costs as well, and Ethernet is the fabric of choice for consolidations. (Ethernet equipment is cheaper than FC gear, and copper is cheaper than fiber.)
Since UC deployments will affect storage requirements, changes in that segregated-traffic status quo may have some implications for UC — and vice versa.
When it comes to consolidating data centers onto a single merged data fabric, iSCSI is the technology of choice. Use is on the rise, especially among smaller and more aggressive companies; 62% of small companies now deploy it, compared with 50% of larger companies. The chief competitor to iSCSI is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE). But fewer than 1% of organizations deploy FCOE today, and fewer than 2% plan to deploy it within the next two years.
However, many organizations harbor lingering doubts about iSCSI performance in high-demand situations — which can include UC. One area of concern is e-mail database access, especially when voice and video messages are incorporated into them for UC.
One approach to dealing with high-demand UC applications is to push 10 Gigabit Ethernet into iSCSI storage networks. 10G is well represented in network cores, where 34.4% of organizations use it now and 49.2% will be using it within two years. It is making significant inroads in networked storage, too, with 25.4% of organizations using it for this purpose now and 37.3% expecting to within the next two years.
The bottom line? When rolling out UC, don’t forget the impact on data center storage. If your data center is converging onto iSCSI, be prepared to accelerate 10G deployment. Planning ahead is the only way to avoid nasty performance surprises in such situations.
