Where’s your IT bottleneck?

Servers and storage devices are achieving performance levels that we could only dream about a few years ago.  Yet, with users demanding ever greater speeds and service levels, how you actually move data between servers, storage and beyond is absolutely critical to success.  Are network speeds now holding businesses back? 

In the current economic climate, virtually every business is looking to gain some kind of advantage over its competitors and win a greater market share.  For a wide range of businesses – from financial services to online betting, telecommunications and online retailers – the ability to conduct transactions more rapidly, or handle more traffic, can have a direct impact on revenues.  Outperform your rivals and you get to eat their lunch.  Fail to deliver the service levels your customers demand and you could lose precious customers to your competitors – and at a time when new customers are very hard to come by. 

Furthermore, in specialist High Performance Computing (HPC) applications – such as semiconductor design, fluid dynamics or automotive engineering – performance is all important and any IT architecture is only as good as its weakest link.

What’s the use of faster servers… if you can’t get the data in and out fast enough?

With processor speeds and the performance of storage subsystems greatly increasing in recent years, the network is becoming the main bottleneck for a lot of organisations – and the network’s impact on overall performance could be set to get a lot worse.  Server vendors are already unveiling products with 10 Gigabit going all the way from the motherboard to the outside world – so having a network that can match these speeds is vital.

Consolidation has also introduced some very real issues with regard to data transfer.  As datacentres undertake server consolidation projects – so that a business can continue to run all of its software applications, but on far fewer servers – there’s much more data being held within, and transferred to and from, each server.  So faster networking becomes even more important.

In the debate over choosing between fibre channel, Ethernet or ‘fibre channel over Ethernet’, each technology has its supporters.  However, if one considers the flexibility offered by Ethernet – together with the advent of relatively low cost 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches – I believe that the balance is definitely moving away from fibre channel.

If you don’t need 10 Gigabit now… you will, soon enough!

Serial attached SCSI has also chipped away at the arguments for fibre channel.  Some vendors claim to have SAS devices that run faster than fibre channel.  With the arrival of SSD (Solid State Discs) an environment that combines SSD, SAS and SATA devices can offer many organisations virtually everything they need for day-to-day data storage – and at a much lower price than fibre channel array options.  For example, for a database solution, the indexing could sit on the SSD element, while the most commonly used data would reside in the SAS devices and the SATA component would cover bulk storage and some archived data.  For such a solution, streaming to SSD over a 1 Gigabit network would cause a big bottleneck, so 10 Gigabit will be essential.

Many businesses are already upgrading their existing network infrastructure with 10 Gigabit, low latency switches.  In addition, even many new, ‘green field’ projects that only require 1 Gigabit in order to meet their current needs, are installing 10 Gigabit switches that can be run at 1 Gigabit.  Choosing these higher capacity devices from the outset, not only offers businesses a level of investment protection, but also enables them to scale up to handle higher throughputs – as and when required – and with the minimum of disruption. 

What’s your view on the rival networking technologies… where’s the bottleneck in your architecture… and what’s the next data transfer issue waiting to bite us all?