Hu's Blog

Last month HDS introduced the Hitachi Compute Blade 500 (CB500) with the latest Intel technology. An interesting new technology that was also introduced with this product was an embedded Ethernet switch. I have asked Gary Pilafas, who has responsibility for Hitachi converged solutions and is a frequent contributor to this blog, http://blogs.hds.com/hu/2011/06/converged-data-solutions-from-hitachi-gary-pilafas.html to tell us more about this technology and what it means for converged solutions.

Here is Gary’s post:

The CB500 blade server from Hitachi has an embedded 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch with the latest enhancements for Data center bridging.

The switch enables Hitachi CB500 to support flexible connectivity options for cloud architectures, including lossless Ethernet fabrics. It provides CB500 customers the choice to enhance their hierarchical network architectures, deploy flatter scale-out fabrics or converge networks when deploying virtualization and cloud IT infrastructures.  It is designed to increase scalability and enhance VM mobility, further simplifying management and significantly reducing operational overhead of virtualized blade server environments.

Designed for Hitachi CB500, jointly with our partner Brocade the 10 Gigabit Ethernet embedded switch has 16 internal ports and 8 external ports.

• Embedded design dramatically reduces cabling, power and cooling requirements compared to external stand-alone switches
  • Wire-speed switch with non-blocking cut through architecture provides industry-leading performance and ultra-low latency
  • Dual speed (1Gbps/10Gbps) capable external ports are well suited for datacenters migrating to next generation 10Gbps high performance architectures
  • Provides flexible connectivity options including 1 Gbps RJ-45 connectors and 10 Gbps twinax copper or optical connectors
• Technology simplifies network architectures and enables cloud computing by delivering and enabling Ethernet fabrics
  • Technology deploys scale-out fabrics instead of a hierarchical network to flatten the network design, and manages the entire fabric as a single Logical Chassis to reduce complexity
  • Compared to classic Ethernet architectures, Ethernet fabrics allow all paths to be active, increasing network performance, utilization and resiliency
  • Datacenter Bridging and multi-hop FCoE capabilities enable lossless unified storage connectivity, and storage and LAN traffic convergence to reduce connectivity cost
• Automatic Migration of Port Profiles (AMPP) feature simplifies virtualized server management by enabling seamless VM mobility
• Offers a rich set of Layer 2 features and can be deployed into classic 1Gb and 10Gb architectures, preserving existing network designs and cabling
• Integrates with Hitachi Chassis Management software enabling end-to-end management of CB500

The CB500 provides 2x better network east-west resiliency, 2x trunk line bandwidth efficiencies, 10x reduction of latency, and no oversubscription limitations.  This not only improves performance by a factor of 2x, but also eliminates expensive cost barriers to the customer.  The network architecture embedded in the Hitachi Data System compute platform and converged solution provides unmatched scalability and flexibility that other networking solutions cannot compete with.