Data Center Infrastructure Beyond 10 GB Ethernet

In July of 2006, YouTube reported 100 million video views per day. In May of 2010 that number climbed to two billion views per day. In February of 2010, Twitter reported 50 million Tweets per day. As of June of 2008, iTunes had 5 billion songs downloads, which increased to 10 billion by February of 2010. Facebook has over 500 million active users with people spending 700 billion minutes per month on the social networking site. Over one million websites have integrated with the Facebook platform. These applications and others like them are creating a new internet and a new way to do business. At the heart of these applications are data centers with continuously increasing need for high-speed bandwidth and storage.

Similarly, the need for increased bandwidth is at the heart of every corporate data center. Five short years ago, no one could predict the impact of carbon taxes, increased compliance and reporting requirements, or the sheer volume of information stored and moved through corporate networks. Virtualization is a driving force in higher speed networking as multiple servers and storage devices share single or dual network connections. Enterprises are doing business with a wider variety of software and hardware platforms and increasingly incorporating collaboration, video and other advanced applications. IT is no longer a necessary evil, but rather a competitive advantage.

Whether delivering the next "killer application" or merely managing the increasing demand for instant data, data centers are increasing speeds, reevaluating existing applications and looking for greener processing in the form of consolidation and virtualization projects. In order to achieve the required higher data rates, new standards and transmission media types are becoming available. Each should be evaluated based on the architecture, design and technical advantages, end to end cost and performance considerations.

The ratification of 40/100GbE by IEEE? has increased the number of high speed transmission options. Likewise, Top of Rack (ToR) switches with short reach twinax copper or fiber assemblies provide a relatively new set of options. Designs for these systems, however, are significantly different than industry standards-based structured cabling; using two strand fiber (10GBASE-SR/SX) and/or 4-pair, twisted pair copper (10GBASE-T and 1000BASE-T) systems. This paper will provide an overview and compare various options for achieving higher speeds in today's emerging data center.