Customer Reviews

I/O Consolidation in the Data Center

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If you are like me and need to understand the FCoE protocol, this book is really nice and I highly recommend it.

The book is short but very concise and goes straight to the points that you need to really know.

The begining of the book is focusing on the technology that you will find in a DC : L2MP, VSS, vPC etc etc .

Then you ll really dig into FCoE. Everything is there. Really there is nothing else to say about this book. you have to read it for sur if you work in a DC environment or want to learn about this technology.

This book along with the UCS book make a perfect pair for a solid knowledge of data center networking and Cisco UCS systems.

A key choice is Silvano Gai and Claudio DeSanti's I/O CONSOLIDATION IN THE DATA CENTER, the first book to explain the recently approved Fibre Channel over Ethernet standard and its technologies. I/O consolidation combines multiple traffic types and each usually has special handling requirements: this book offers insights into consolidating these into a single Data Center Ethernet network and is key for any advanced programming library.

I'll quote from the book's introduction: "This book is neither a manual, nor a standard, nor a release note, nor a product announcement. This book was written to explain the concepts behind UCS to a large audience, It is not authoritative on anything; please reference the appropriate official documents when evaluating products, designing solutions, or conducting business. The authors do not provide any guarantee of the correctness of the content and are not liable for any mistakes or imprecision."

UCS is one of the largest endeavors ever attempted by Cisco. It is a data center computing solution that is not a simple "me too" design, but rather a radical paradigm shift. For our enterprise, UCS is the foundation of our private cloud. If you only desire a very high level view of UCS, cisco.com can give you that and you don't need this book. This book consists of 50% reference material applicable to any server architecture and 50% specific to UCS, The reference material includes updated processor, memory, I/O, and virtualization architectures.

There is a CD in the book with a UCS Manager emulator; however, it is not the current version available. For those who have a cisco.com account, you should download the most recent emulation software. It runs as a pre-configured VM in VMware Player. Instructions on the Cisco site are good.

Imagine this: you buy hardware, all of your servers are no more than XML configuration files, you have all your data backed up. You have a disaster. You apply your XML configuration files and restore your data. That's it. Business Continuity (DR) made easy and reliable because everything is abstracted from the hardware.

The consolidation referred to by the book takes place inside a data center, where crucial assumptions can be made about short cabling lengths and the existence of reliable hardware, ie. very low bit rate losses over the distances inside the center. The authors describe briefly existing network choices, like iSCSI and Infiniband. What they advocate is Fibre Channel over Ethernet [FCoE]. This allows for a unified network inside the center, and concomitant savings in hardware and system maintenance.

Much of the book is taken up with explaining FCoE, like its architectural models. The details can get somewhat involved, even though the book deliberately omits some information. A major simplifying concept to understand is that FCoE uses encapsulation of a FC payload. With no fragmenting, there is thus no need for reassembly and all that this implies in complexity. [By close analogy, think of what TCP has to do when it reassembles packets.] Which also speeds up FCoE processing, aiding low latency demands.

The most intricate descriptions seem to be about combining FCoE with virtualisation. The latter is now a hot topic within data centers, and making this work with FCoE is nontrivial.

The book does not claim that FCoE will entirely supplant existing alternatives like iSCSI, but suggests that these might be pushed out to non-data center usages.