Network consolidation and converged networks are hot topics. Find out how Virtual Connect Flex-10 reduces NICs, switches and cables by up to 75 percent.

Network consolidation

HP Virtual Connect is simply the smartest way to connect blade servers to your LAN and SAN. By virtualizing connections, cable count is reduced, management is simplified and everyone – server, LAN and SAN administrator – can do their job without impacting the others. And with the introduction of Virtual Connect with Flex-10 technologies, each blade server can have up to four times as many NIC connections without adding NIC cards or switches.

The HP ProLiant BL495c – the world’s first server specifically designed for virtualization – is equipped with two 1Gb network connections on the motherboard. With optional mezzanine NICs, the BL495c can have up to eight 1Gb network connections. This ordinary approach is great for physical servers and provides a 33 percent increase in NIC connections over comparable blade servers from Dell, IBM and Sun.

But add a Virtual Connect Flex-10 module to the picture and the BL495c becomes anything but ordinary. Virtual Connect takes the two 10Gb connections and expands them to eight – and the bandwidth of each of the eight becomes individually adjustable between 100Mb/sec and 10 Gb/sec. On top of that, with Virtual Connect Flex-10, the number of modules needed to provide redundant connections to the blade server is reduced from eight to two.

There’s a lot of talk about converging different protocols onto an Ethernet LAN. The idea has significant merit and, for the near future, equally significant challenges.

For instance, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) has captured the imagination of the industry but requires “lossless Ethernet” or Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE, pronounced ‘sea’). A few products that support CEE have been announced and can deliver up to a 50 percent network consolidation with one notable caveat. The entire Ethernet network must be built on these new products.

The caveat comes from the fact that the way to make the Ethernet standard lossless has not been approved by the ANSI T11 standards committee. Consequently, these new products are proprietary.
To get the 50 percent network consolidation requires a wholesale rip-and-replace of your current LAN infrastructure.

Virtual Connect, on the other hand uses standard Ethernet protocols. When the CEE standard does emerge – and HP is helping to shape that standard today – you can be assured the Virtual Connect family of products will support it. In the meantime, if network consolidation is your goal, you can still eliminate 75 percent of the network infrastructure for your blades and be ready when FCoE is ready.