Posted on behalf of Jaiwant Virk, Product Manager for Dell Networking.
There’s a major IT transformation taking place in IT by way of quantum growth in data. According to IDC, the “Big Data” technology and services forecast is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015. Along with this tremendous growth in storage and computing, Networking will play a large part in stitching the fabric of IT together by ensuring high levels of availability and security.
Dell’s Virtual Network Architecture (VNA) vision is a step in a direction designed to include the stack of products to help meet the challenges of growth. It’s a concept on how to build and manage networks, and is executed with a readily available stack of products. Next week during the Networking sessions at Dell Storage Forum in Boston, we will discuss the components of Dell VNA, including Fabric switches for aggregation and forwarding of data and network services to support the policies like Security, Wan Optimization, and Load Balancing. We will focus on one of our key differentiators, the software behind the switches. Force10 Operating System (FTOS) manages the Layer2 and Layer3 protocols based on Open Standards (nothing proprietary), and Command Line Interface (CLI) extremely similar to NXoS and IOS. So a user turns on the Dell switch and understands the network immediately because it is interoperable not only with Dell switches, but also switches from every other vendor. Our automation, orchestration and policy control configure and manage the network faster, more easily and consequently, at a lesser cost.
During the Networking sessions, we will cover Data Center Networking with an overview on top-of-rack, aggregation and core switches. In particular, we will highlight Storage Networking to link directly to a SAN infrastructure, minimizing complexity and reducing costs. We will discuss best practices with iSCSI and reference architectures for some of the scenarios. The reference architectures would include both iSCSI and Converged FCoE scenarios.
A major highlight will also be the Dell Force10 10/40GbE MXL Switch, the latest blade switch from Dell Networking. High performance, high density,(32x10GbE server facing ports, 10/40GbE uplinks) and low latency in a modular blade design make this an attractive product. Here, we will go over details of this offering including using it as part of a converged network. Please join us at Dell Storage Forum for an overview of IO Optimized Architectures perfect for all workloads (virtualized, distributed or clustered).
Jaiwant Virk will lead the “Dell Force10 Networks SAN Best Practices and Configurations for Performance, Availability and Scalability” breakout sessions at Dell Storage Forum in Boston.To learn more and continue the conversation follow @DellNetworking and #DellSF12 on twitter.