High power consumption is a significant pain point for ever-expanding
data centers. The industry has seen many recent innovations in the areas
of cooler CPUs, server virtualization, blade servers and "stateless"
servers where storage resides in SAN or NAS environments. The EDC
Initiative's mission is to educate and provide best practices for
efficient computing when network and storage I/O processing capabilities
at 10Gb/s or higher are needed, or the desire to consolidate I/O in the
server farm to a single wire and enable IT managers to deliver
significantly higher application service levels, while reducing CAPEX
and OPEX related to server and storage I/O infrastructures.
A data center can be defined as a facility that contains concentrated equipment to perform one or more of the following functions: Store, manage, process, and exchange digital data and information. Such digital data and information is typically applied in one of two ways: support the informational needs of large institutions (such as corporations and educational institutions), and provide application services or management for various types of data processing (such as web hosting, Internet, intranet, telecommunication, and information technology).
With this growth in IT capacity, data centers have become major consumers of electrical energy to power and cool the equipment. Furthermore, data center networks have increased in size and managing a growing multi-infrastructure has become a daunting task. Enterprise data centers currently use three different networks– Storage Area Networks using Fibre Channel transport for storage access, Local Area Network using Ethernet transport for standard network access and System Area Networks using InfiniBand transport for inter-process communication and high-performance clustering.
