It is universally accepted that customers buy datacenters infrastructure to run their business applications. It is natural that customers expect that infrastructure ensures continuous delivery and high performance of applications. This blog looks at networking solutions from HPE and Arista that ensure the success of IP storage deployments in enterprise data centers.
Once upon a time, when Ethernet’s top speed was one gigabit per second, dates raged in the networked storage community about the viability of Ethernet as a transport of storage traffic. These debates faded away as 10GbE Ethernet followed by 40GbE and 25/100GbE became a reality driven by the Ethernet economics of scale. Today, enterprises are deploying IP storage in their data centers and expect networking infrastructure to ensure high availability and high performance of business applications.
Customers concerns stem from the fact that storage networks are fragile and require special attention. TCP/IP is a best effort guaranteed delivery protocol that will get congested due to many reasons, including retransmissions, storage devices timing out and Ethernet speeds mismatches. The lack of adequate visibility of networking flows does not help. HPE and Arista have networking solutions that address customers concerns and deliver reliable high performance networking that gracefully handles bursty storage traffic and networking speeds mismatch. HPE and Arista deliver just that giving customers reliable, agile networks that are designed with IP storage in mind.
Successful IP storage deployments require networking infrastructure that delivers reliability with no packet loss, deterministic behavior with robust error recovery and predictable performance that handles bursty storage traffic and networking speed mismatches. HPE and Arista offers a spine/leaf switch solutions that are designed for IP Storage and similar applications. The Arista 7500R spine switch, the Arista 7280R family of leaf/spine switches and the Arista 7020R leaf switches offer low latency, deep buffers, lossless Ethernet and a rich set of analytics tools for to monitor and remedy networking congestion.
Low latency lossless networking – Switches port to port latencies often times get more attention than warranted. When it comes to applications performance, aggregate latencies across the entire data path matter more than the latency of one device. Switches are certainly not the slowest element in the data path, but it is great to have low latencies. HPE and Arista above mentioned switches offer some of the lowest latencies on the market.
When coupled with lossless Ethernet based on Data Center Bridging (DCB), low latencies make a big difference and give customers an extra edge over competition that may be deploying slower and more traditional solutions.
Deep buffers with VOQ architecture – The truth is that most, if not all data centers contain server connections with disparate speeds ranging from gigabit all the way to 25GbE. On the uplinks side, speeds go up to 100GbE creating speed mismatches that need deep buffers to smooth data traffic especially in IP storage environments with large files. The Arista 7500R, 7280R and 7020R all come with extraordinary large deep buffers that enable them to significantly reduce congestion.
Virtual Output Queue (VOQ) available on all above switches helps in eliminating head-of-the line (HOL) blocking by maintaining separate virtual queues for each output port. Deep buffers with VOQ enhance networking and applications performance.
Networking monitoring and analytics – Network congestion is a reality of life. Monitoring and analytics tools have tried to detect and alleviate congestions, but with less than desirable success. Arista has taken an intuitive approach to detecting congestion by taking snapshots of network flows in microsecond intervals. The change to smaller intervals allows Arista’s Latency Analyzer (LANZ) to detect microbursts and TCP incast conditions in real time.
Arista’s Rapid Automated Indication of Link-Loss (RAIL) feature uses the switch intelligence to proxy send TCP Session Resets (RST) to facilitate recovery of nodes that have failed or lost connectivity to networking switches.
Arista’s LANZ and RAIL help reduce the impact of congestion on networking performance and reduce failover times; thus enhancing availability and reliability of the network and the data center.
HPE and Arista solutions for IP storage
HPE and Arista offer customers end-to-end data center solutions that include servers, storage and networking. The HPE offering is supported by HPE’s PointNext world renounced teams with local presence worldwide. HPE gives customers a single worldwide contact for all data center infrastructure, support and services. The HPE infrastructure offerings include HPE blade and rack servers, HPE 3PAR and Nimble storage and Arista networking solutions.
If you are looking for scalable, agile and automated solutions for your IP storage deployments, then look no further than HPE and Arista and take advantage of easy to deploy and manage solutions with lower TCO.
For more information:
- Sales Play: IP Storage https://psnow.ext.hpe.com/doc?id=A00000415ENW
- PoD: Networking for IP Storage for Partners https://hpe-external.sabacloud.com/Saba/Web_spf/HPE/common/ledetail/01095808
- Solution brief: Networking for IP Storage
- Discover Las Vegas 2017: Networking for IP Storage breakout session on Wednesday June 7 at Noon.