Data center design and architecture remain important considerations for companies of all size. Optimizing applications to achieve the greatest performance at the lowest cost is a goal of all companies. With an increased number of technologies and alternatives, IT architects now have more options for optimizing their architectures.
Some of the technologies having the greatest impact include physical consolidation of computing, the consolidation of workloads using server virtualization and solid-‐state flash storage systems. Both the increased CPU cores per socket and Blade systems are increasing server density, driving higher utilization of connections between elements and reducing the number of cables required for servers.
In order to provide real-‐world results to enable IT professionals to make informed decisions, Evaluator Group compared two alternative configurations. A demanding set of applications was chosen to run in a virtualized environment using the VMware hypervisor on two competing platforms. This test compared an IBM Flex System using end-‐to-‐end FC connectivity to a Cisco UCS with FCoE to FC storage connectivity. In both instances, the same high-‐speed IBM FlashSystem 840 solid-‐state storage system was used as the storage target.
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