Implementing Rack-Level I/O Consolidation

The desire to consolidate datacenter I/O has existed for several decades. It has been driven by I/O hardware providers who didn’t want to develop multiple versions of the same I/O card for different computer busses, and by end-users who did not want to stock multiple cards, as well as manage different fabrics with different tools. The problems that I/O consolidation needs to solve are:

• 

  Figure 1. Consolidated Ethernet and Fibre Channel Infrastructure
  Standing up a server today costs more than the server itself, and is measured in weeks.
• Lack of server I/O slots (and redundant host adapters) means that single points of failure exist at the host/network interface.
  
• Most servers are over-provisioned in their I/O resources, since they are provisioned for peak I/O loads rather than average loads.
• Leaf switches have proliferated in the datacenter to consolidate physical server connections and reduce the demand for high-cost director ports.

Key Solution Components

To be effective, an I/O consolidation solution must transparently consolidate protocols in the rack, while at the same time virtualizing connections from the rack to the network, and consolidating traffic from servers to the network fabrics, as explained below.

Protocol Consolidation: This allows multiple server protocols to be carried on a single high-performance transport. Such a capability should:

1. transport all server protocols (Ethernet, Fibre Channel, FCoE, InfiniBand, SAS/SATA, etc);
2. provide bandwidth far in excess of the demands of any single protocol; and
3. be transparent to vendor-supplied I/O drivers.

When this capability is successfully implemented, it will eliminate the single point of failure problem caused by the reduction in server I/O slots, without requiring proprietary solutions.

Connection Virtualization: This concept allows network ports, addresses, etc. presented to the server to be logically separated from the actual network ports, addresses, etc that the network actually provides. This capability has several benefits:

1. 

   Figure 2. Consolidated and Shared I/O Infrastructure MR-IOV enabled I/O is shared among servers and top of rack switches are moved to end of row.
   provisioning ports and addresses for servers can now be done without support from network and storage administrators;
2. multiple physical ports to be aggregated into a single logical port; and
3. changes in network technologies and topologies can be made without affecting the servers attached to them.
   
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