David Hall and I sat on two panels. David shared his visions on how data center users should prepare their cabling infrastructure now for 40/100GbE. He also discussed market trends, 40/100GbE technologies and cabling building blocks, and more importantly the optimal migration path to 40/100GbE in the future and what actions can be taken now that allow for seamless eventual upgrade to 40/ 100GbE. Data center designers should plan to design their cabling infrastructure today with the eventual deployment of 40/100GbE in mind.
My topic was converged 40/100GbE data center fabric. Given the trend of data center virtualization, east-west network traffic flow is increasing rapidly so data center network architectures must evolve. I illustrated how to design a converged data center network based on fat tree fabric to achieve the goals of connecting any resource and delivering workload anywhere in a non-blocking manner. The key conclusion was that by utilizing the designs shown in the panel, data center designers can preserve their investments in today’s 10GbE networks for future upgrades to 40/100GbE technologies.
Data center operators are starting to deploy 40G in the core. This will migrate closer to the edge and 100G will start to show in the cores of data center networks. Certain cabling and architecture strategies implemented now prepare the data center for eventual speed upgrades.
**CommScope is a regular contributor on Data Center POST