Implementing IBM System Networking 10Gb Ethernet Switches

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012. All rights reserved. 1

Chapter 1. Introduction to IBM System

Networking 10Gb Ethernet

products

Networks are changing. Voice, video, storage, and data are quickly converging onto a single

backbone. Growth in cloud services and Web 2.0 multimedia content is pushing bandwidth

demand to the edge. These bandwidth demands are also increasing as clients employ

virtualization and focus on maximizing server usage. The next level of network consolidation

has to do with I/O and storage.

Gigabit Ethernet link aggregation is reaching its limits because of cable management issues,

power and cooling costs for multiple switches, and administrative impact and

limited bandwidth.

Multicore processing environments with large memory configuration require substantial

bandwidth. As the demands for mission-critical and real-time applications continue to expand,

servers must offer higher processing capabilities to keep up. Because existing switch

architectures cannot handle the data throughput required for these applications, they are

becoming bottlenecks.

This chapter provides details about the IBM System Networking 10Gb switches that are used

for the two implementations in this publication. We first describe the architectures in

Chapter 3, “Reference architectures” on page 107, and the actual configuration procedures

are documented in Chapter 5, “IBM System Networking RackSwitch implementation” on

page 155 and Chapter 6, “IBM Virtual Fabric 10Gb Switch Module implementation” on

page 239.

Although there are many possible implementations of 10 Gb infrastructures, we focus

primarily on the IBM System Networking 10Gb switches and the specific features that are

available and are related to our reference architecture.

1

Terminology: Because of the recent acquisition of BNT by IBM, some of the product

names used in this publication might change.