Panduit and Solarflare Showcase Converged LAN/SAN Data Center Network

PANDUIT, in Unified Physical Infrastructure (UPI) solutions, and Solarflare Communications, Inc., provider of standards-compliant 10GbE silicon are working together to demonstrate a virtualized, converged LAN/SAN data center network over 10G at the Interop show in Las Vegas, May 19-21.

PANDUIT’s Unified Physical Infrastructure solutions enable convergence across computing, communication, control, power, and security systems while improving availability, agility,
and security.

UPI-based data center solutions feature high speed data transport capabilities to connect server, storage, and network systems with unparalleled performance, reliability, and scalability to minimize risks associated with convergence and consolidation.

This high speed data transport capability is ideal as server virtualization becomes more prevalent in data center environments. With multiple virtual machines, server I/O becomes throttled in a 1G network.

By incorporating the PANDUIT TX6A 10GIG Category 6A UTP Cabling System with Solarflare’s Solarstorm vNIC controllers, 10Xpress 10GBASE-T transceivers and a Cisco Catalyst 4900M switch in the data center infrastructure in conjunction with vSphere-ready VMware ESX 3.0 platform, virtual machines can use iSCSI over Ethernet as their storage network allowing businesses to achieve 10 Gigabit performance with extremely low-latency in tens of microseconds.

“Through innovative engineering and application expertise, the 10GIG Copper Cabling System eliminates the concerns regarding alien crosstalk,” said Phil Chandler, Product Line Manager at PANDUIT. “We are able to demonstrate the cabling system’s performance in conjunction with Solarflare’s technology to show optimized virtualization, iSCSI and network convergence over 10GBASE-T. This combination delivers a very cost-effective platform and minimizes the risks associated with convergence, performance, and ever-increasing user and application demands on the data center infrastructure.”

The innovative 10GIG Copper Cabling System design utilizes PANDUIT’s patent pending Matrix Technology in the cable and advanced compensation techniques in the connectivity to achieve channel bandwidth performance well above the TIA/EIA 568B.2-10 and ISO Class EA standard requirements. This design reduces the weight and diameter of Category 6A UTP cables, improving pathway capacity up to 30% for improved airflow through dense data center enclosures without compromising alien crosstalk performance.

In addition, Solarflare will be demonstrating its Open Onload middleware with a Cisco Catalyst 4900M switch to show a two-fold improvement in user datagram protocol (UDP) multicast performance with extremely low latency and jitter. This solution is ideal for financial markets and enables the implementation of off-the-shelf Ethernet and TCP/IP to accelerate market data systems without requiring the implementation of new wire protocols or applications. IT managers can build market data delivery systems designed to handle increasing message rates while reducing the message delivery latency and latency jitter between servers. The result is a higher rate of successful trades in less time and a more accurate, near instantaneous view of world markets.

“In these times of economic downturn, companies look to closely manage IT costs and simultaneously accelerate business operations by adopting next-generation technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing,” said Bruce Tolley, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Solarflare Communications. “Our high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions provide a competitive advantage to organizations by making upgrading to 10Gbps speeds possible and cost-efficient.”

PANDUIT and Solarflare solutions deliver network availability, agility, and security throughout the data center.