Unified Networking on Intel Ethernet

Unified Networking enables cost-effective connectivity to the LAN and the SAN on the same Ethernet fabric; customers can use NFS, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to carry storage traffic over Ethernet. These solutions simplify the data center by reducing equipment needs and costs.

Intel’s Unified Networking solutions are enabled through a combination of standard Intel® Ethernet products along with trusted network protocols integrated in the Operating systems. Thus, Unified Networking is available with our Ethernet switching products, as well as on every Server either through LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM) implementation or via an add-in Network Interface Card (NIC).

Unlike other 10GbE vendors, Intel has delivered high quality Ethernet products for over 30 years and our Unified Networking solutions are built on the same founding principles that made us successful in Ethernet.

Data Center Bridging delivers lossless Ethernet

Data Center Bridging
IT productivity and agility depend on how your network is connected as well as the relationship between applications and services and how they communicate. In an effort to help optimize these relationships while empowering IT, Intel is driving Data Center Bridging (DCB), a new collection of standards-based end-to-end networking technologies that make Ethernet the unified fabric for multiple types of traffic in the data center.

The DCB Advantage
Intel is working with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to help develop standards for DCB. These standards will provide:

Enhanced performance for Ethernet LAN.

Lossless fabric for storage traffic on converged networks.

Deterministic latency for High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) traffic.

Virtual links by traffic class, applying pause-per-class, and end-to-end congestion management and notification.

Seamless integration with classical Ethernet networks.
In addition, DCB-enabled networks will provide the foundation for next-generation initiatives such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

Simplifying the Data Center
Enabling multiple traffic types to use Ethernet fabric will simplify the data center by reducing the amount of equipment in the infrastructure. By enabling storage traffic over Ethernet, IT can eliminate the need for some storage-specific switches and host bus adapters (HBAs) in the network, creating a simpler network while reducing equipment costs.

As server virtualization and consolidation and 10 Gigabit Ethernet become mainstream data center requirements, DCB will provide the simple, robust, and cost-effective networking needed to use these technologies to their fullest potential.