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FEATURE

Cisco Helping Untangle the Data Center

Data centers are being strangled by too many cables. Cisco sees an answer in Ethernet

Sept. 28, 2009

By Charles Waltner

Cisco Systems would like to help data centers do a little housecleaning.

Symbolic of the complexities that plague computing facilities as they struggle with the demands of the Information Age, the multitude of cables required to connect all the machines in data centers are causing massive costs and headaches.

A typical computer server now requires at least eight or nine cables for tasks that should only need two connections. Multiply that by the hundreds of servers in major data centers and you've got a tangled mess on your hands.

As data centers have expanded to keep up with rapidly growing traffic from the Internet, business applications, video and smartphones, they are literally running out of room as the floors fill with cables.

"There are so many cables that managers even worry a technician will accidentally pull the plug on a crucial service," says Cindy Borovick, an analyst with research firm IDC.

Experts estimate that as much as 15 percent of the cost of data center equipment now goes to cabling. Multiple networks with their own sets of cables force data centers to buy extra equipment just to manage all the necessary connections, Borovick says.

More cables also means more energy demands. Cisco estimates companies can trim 20 to 30 percent off their power bill by simply reducing the number of cables and other equipment connecting their servers.

Industry experts also say that more simplicity in cabling is necessary for virtualization, the great hope for modernizing data centers for 21st century communications. "You need to clean up before you can move," Borovick says.

She says the situation has gotten out of control because the data center has evolved as three technological islands of different networks and various servers and data storage systems, each with their own communications technologies.

Ethernet to the Rescue

But Cisco, along with most of the industry – including its rivals – are looking to a technology known as Ethernet to save the day. Invented 30 years ago as a simple way to connect computers in an office, Ethernet has grown up to become the primary method of linking most all Internet-based networks, including the world's largest and most demanding telecommunications systems.

Because Ethernet is so widely used, Borovick says over time it becomes far less expensive than other communications options. Also, far more technicians are familiar with Ethernet than other connection technologies, which help reduce staffing and operating costs.

"Ethernet has experienced a tidal wave of innovation," Borovick says. "So it makes a lot of sense for people to start moving to Ethernet to consolidate their cabling."

Like any big housecleaning project, Cisco is focusing its data center cabling cleanup on the biggest mess first. Jackie Ross, a marketing executive in Cisco's server access and virtualization group, says technology managers can eliminate as much as 70 percent of their redundant cables by streamlining their server connections with Ethernet.

Servers need to connect to both outside networks and other internal systems, such as data storage systems, to support their software applications for running Websites, streaming videos or hosting information systems.

To clean up the clutter of connections to servers, Cisco has been actively supporting two technology standards that have emerged this year. One of these, called "lossless" Ethernet, bolsters Ethernet's ability to dependably carry data, and to do so at higher speeds. The other, called Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), makes it possible for servers to use Ethernet to more easily carry traffic to popular storage systems.

FCoE has already been officially ratified as an industry standard, and observers say lossless Ethernet will likely be ratified late this year. Combined, the two standards make it easier to carry network and storage traffic together on the same cable.

But as part of its push to use Ethernet to unify data center communications, Cisco already supports these standards in key products, including its Nexus 5000 data center networking switch and its new Unified Computing System, which integrates computing and networking operations to better support virtualization. The company plans to support the new Ethernet standards in more of its products, Ross says.

As another sign of its commitment to cultivating industry-wide support for Ethernet, Cisco earlier this year backed off on efforts to brand its approach to Ethernet for the data center, dubbed – logically enough – "Data Center Ethernet." Combined with efforts by other vendors to spin their own marketing terms, customers were simply becoming confused, Ross says.

"The industry was starting to get distracted by what we were going to call these standards, and that wasted energy wasn't in anybody's best interest, especially our customers," she says. "We needed to make it as clear as possible that we simply want to get this problem addressed, and from our perspective, Ethernet is what we all need to rally around."

Unraveling Slowly

Though industry momentum is clearly behind Cisco's vision of using Ethernet to create a "unified fabric" for the data center, the company recognizes that many customers are already heavily invested in other communications technologies.

With this in mind, the company is particularly enthusiastic about FCoE, which it views as a way data center managers can have their cake and eat it, too. Fibre Channel is by far the most common method for connecting storage-intensive applications, and the new standard allows companies to benefit from Ethernet's advantages without disrupting their current storage systems.

Though Cisco believes in its vision for Ethernet's role in the data center, it realizes that the cabling clean up will be different for each data center. There are dozens of other connection technologies in use, and analysts estimate it will take as long as 10 years for the industry to transition to some semblance of a single connection standard throughout the data center.

Despite the challenges of reducing the mountain of cables piling up in data centers, technology managers seem to be jumping on the Ethernet bandwagon. Even before the ink is dry on the new Ethernet standards, companies are adopting them to tidy up their computing operations.

Brian Denton, the chief technology officer at ExamWorks, a fast-growing start-up that provides verification services of medical examinations for insurance or legal claims, says new Ethernet standards have helped him pare his facility's cabling down to eight lines. He estimates a traditional approach would require about 35 cables for his relatively small data center.

Even established data centers are turning to Ethernet as the tie to bind together all data center machines, says Andreas Antonopoulos, an industry analyst with Nemertes Research.

During the past year, he has seen many companies adopt Ethernet in conjunction with IP-based storage technologies as an alternative to more expensive Fibre Channel options. Previously, Fibre Channel was a much faster technology, but improvements in Ethernet promise to make it nearly as fast and dependable.

"It has become the poor man's Fibre Channel," Antonopoulos says.

Though Ethernet equipment based on the new standards is generally more expensive, the savings made possible by streamlining data center cabling make these new options extremely appealing, he says. "The move to new Ethernet technologies is really about finding the best way of addressing the operational challenges of managing an octopus."

To learn more, watch webcast. http://tools.cisco.com/cmn/jsp/index.jsp?id=92757

Charles Waltner is a freelance journalist in Piedmont, Calif.