Abstract

Traditional data centers may be built on multiple fabrics – Ethernet for server interconnection, Fibre channel for storage networks, and InfiniBand for high performance compute clusters.

With new development of Ethernet, such as lossless Ethernet technologies, high performance Ethernet NICs supporting RDMA and MPI, NVMe over RoCE all-flash storage systems, Ethernet-based data center network solutions started to replace Fibre Channel and InfiniBand solutions to provide equivalent or better performance. Furthermore, Ethernet solutions are typically more cost effective. They are supported by more vendors. And 400G Ethernet switches are widely available on market now while current Fibre Channel switches typically only support up to 64G FC ports. For all these reasons, modern data centers are moving from the multi-protocol mode towards converged all-Ethernet.

Based on the considerations above, Huawei launched the hyper-converged data center networks CloudFabric 3.0 solution. It consists of two components: Huawei CloudEngine data center switches, and Huawei iMaster NCE-Fabric, an intelligent network management and control system.

Huawei commissioned Tolly to evaluate Huawei’s lossless Ethernet data center network solution, and compare it with Fibre Channel in storage area network test cases and with InfiniBand in high performance computing scenarios.