Force 10 will not be the last company that Dell acquired on enterprise-class products

The acquisition of force 10 is not unusual for Dell.

As a representative manufacturer of High-performance Ethernet, Force 101 is not very large business volume and enterprise scale, but based on its unique high-performance Ethernet, distributed core network positioning, Force 10 in the global dozens of countries have users, and its products, channels and partners professional level, are unique in the network industry.

The only problem is that Force 10 has not been big for the last decade, on the one hand because of the intense competition in the Ethernet market, Cisco, Huawei and the acquisition of foundry and other companies are very strong, on the other hand, as the data center of integration, Some of the major suppliers of the Ethernet market are not businesses involved in servers, storage, or acquisitions by more powerful network vendors, which in turn form suppliers involved in a wide range of network markets. For Force 10来, it is becoming increasingly difficult to attract customers ' choices with only high-performance Ethernet.

For Dell, even with Brocade, Cisco maintained good relations of cooperation, its Powerconnect network product line in the past decade also has a lot of accumulation, but not more in-depth integration, integration and even integration, after all, is Dell in the data center and enterprise-level business market. Dell has successfully consolidated storage line equallogic, compellent, and even exanet and Ocarina networks as Dell's last big chunk of enterprise-class business "short boards" that need to be consolidated.

So the speed with which Dell's integration into force 10 is so astonishing is based on a desire for networked products and a more integrated data center business. Dell in nine months time, not only completed the financial and business acquisition of Force 10, but also completed the absorption of Force 10 technology, products and solutions, Even now this integration has been a great boost to the business of force 10. This is thanks to Dell's desire for online business and its expensive weight in business.

According to a recent media interview in Beijing, Dell Global network sales Vice President Armughan Ahmad said that nine months after the acquisition, Force 10 global staff growth of more than 1.5 times times, the launch of 13 new products and services to achieve more than 50% year-on-year growth rate, And then become the 10GbE Network field market share of the third, 40GbE network market second. Dell's End-to-end infrastructure has become more complete with 20 acquisitions over the past three years
In addition, Dell's global supply chain advantage has also played a huge role in Force 10, prior to the acquisition, Force 10 of the supply cycle of more than 30 days, but now its S series Network equipment supply period has been shortened to 5 days; Force 10 Follow the traditional network industry's "next business day onsite service" Now replaced by Dell's 4-hour onsite service, these have not only greatly facilitated the business of force 10, but have also created Dell's competitive advantage over technology, products and services with traditional network vendors. Dell Global Network Sales Vice President Armughan Ahmad

"After the acquisition, we added 500 customers per quarter, expanding our team and business in amazing growth." "Armughan Ahmad stressed that after the acquisition force 10 more than 50% of the year-on-year growth rate is" depressed market conditions "obtained. Armughan Ahmad believes that, as Dell has completed acquisitions of force 10 and SonicWALL since last year, Dell has completed a replenishment of the last data center business product line in the network and security in 2011, helping Dell turn its attention to service areas in 2012, consulting, Manage, implement, and support the business to further strengthen Dell's "end-to-end hands-on capabilities".

Dell Greater China Network business Director Li Haiping

Virtualization Network promotes Dell End-to-end strategy

"Virtualization is a big trend from the IT industry perspective, and we've seen it as a trend for many customers to start experimenting, and, of course, cloud computing," he said. "Armughan Ahmad believes that the trend of virtualization and the cloud will profoundly affect the user's demand for the network, and users will find more high-performance, more open, more virtualized network solutions."

Armughan Ahmad believes that in virtualization, server virtualization is at the forefront, now storage virtualization, and the server and storage are increasingly virtualized, the user's data center needs to complete the whole virtualization transformation, because the whole era has entered the "Virtualization era." Therefore, users will seek to adapt to the era of virtualization, the virtual network architecture to replace the traditional physical network architecture, thereby further improve the network flexibility and data center flexibility. Dell Network's core strategy Dell networking is an important link to the eventual implementation of Dell's End-to-end strategy

Robert Whiteley, an analyst at Forrester Research, said earlier this year: "Virtualization and network technology have been evolving over the past 10 years." Virtualization is a highly reliant network-dependent computing structure, which means that the network architecture must progress with servers, storage, and desktop systems. In the past, the network was nothing more than a pipeline connecting many hardware devices; Now, the web has become a new infrastructure. ”

However, network virtualization adds a layer of abstraction and complexity to the network, so most network virtualization vendors offer a set of best practice guidance for deployment programs or a virtualized network architecture for Dell, which is Dell's Virtual network Architecture (VNA).

VNA is a framework for virtualization, automation, and coordination of network services in data centers, university campuses, and branch office environments, and is an end-to-end 10GB Ethernet Ethernet program that includes a 10Gb overhead and 10GB/40GB Ethernet distributed core architecture-VNA is based on Force10 NX the various virtualization and automation plans deployed over the past three years, designed to integrate servers and storage into virtual networks, the goal is to become a network of end-to-end software definitions for specific usages, such as multi-tenant data centers, to support virtual machine mobility, data center coordination, and Management.

And after Force 10 joined Dell, its original design idea and meaning of VNA has also been expanded, VNA extends to the whole end-to-end solution from data center to mobile terminal relies on VNA virtual network architecture with Dell switch, server and storage system tight integration, Dell will build support data center , a wide, virtualized network of mobile clients between university campuses and remote sites, such as WLAN access points, tablets, and smartphones.

VNA, it can be said, is a catalyst for Dell's end-to-end strategy. For Dell, the original End-to-end strategy does cover data centers, business platforms, and mobile terminals, but Dell also desperately needs a "link network" that connects them, traditional networks based on physical devices and physical settings, rather than virtualized, software-based definitions, VNA is a good solution to the problem: it allows different types of networks to be the same virtualization network.

Dell VNA will profoundly impact the "web World"

"The impact of Dell's virtual network architecture on the network is like the impact of virtualization on the server." The impact is profound and rapid. Armughan Ahmad says Vna is a "open framework for efficient IT infrastructure and workload intelligence," which he says will be an innovative, pragmatic, easy-to-use, open, and flexible virtualization network technology.

Armughan Ahmad specifically mentions that VNA is not a closed, proprietary network architecture, unlike the data centers of the past few decades and the entire Ethernet market, "VNA is an open network architecture that integrates all of Dell's advanced technologies on the Web," And Dell will help force 10 of the original technology, products and solutions, "into a good business."

VNA's openness, he says, is reflected in many ways. First, VNA is supported by almost all mainstream applications, virtualization platforms, Hyper-V, Oracle VM, VMware, Citrix, KVM Support, and support for OpenStack, Cloudstack, and second, Dell based Cisco , brocade good cooperation, VNA with the open switch manufacturer has the deep cooperation and the support; third, VNA provides the industry with free, thorough programmable interfaces that are open, and, finally, VNA based on Dell's Open, standard, and simplified hardware product architecture, either force 10 of the distributed core or the application of security vendors, WAN optimization, load balancing and so on, can be used in these tightly coupled VNA platform to use the Virtualization Exchange services.

"Dell is an open architecture from software to hardware, which provides the foundation for our Open virtualized network architecture." Li Haiping, Dell's director of network operations in Greater China, said that VNA also supported the mainstream virtual environment, virtual control with SDN's innovative manufacturers Bigswitch authorized cooperation, support standard virtual Exchange interface standards, 40G ready. The sophomore strategy future Z9000 core Exchange and S4810 core convergence products will support the standard Trill protocol. In addition to impacting the Web world, Force 10 is also impacting Dell's computing and storage

Of course, Force 10, bought by Dell, will not forget the word "distributed core", which is, after all, one of the most important core ideas of force more than 10 years of operation. The distributed core of Force 10 is designed for the highly scalable data center, the core and access in the current distributed core, the core and access can run three-tier routing protocol, but also can run two-layer protocol.

In this respect, Li Haiping said, Dell will strive to meet data center extensions, simplify virtualization services, and meet the needs of enterprise mobility through distributed core architecture solutions, and the core of the entire Dell Virtual network architecture is to achieve horizontal and vertical expansion of the datacenter network within the data center through a distributed core architecture solution.

"Distributed is certainly the future direction, because the volume of data in the explosive growth, but the ability of stand-alone box is always lagging, because you have to be subject to chip processing power, power and space." But the distribution is not widely accepted, which is largely a concept, but it is changing. "Li Haiping believes that the distributed core and VNA of Force 10 will greatly affect the network world, its impact is not limited to the data center network, but also affect the cloud computing, virtual desktop, mobile terminals and other fields, in the entire End-to-end network world has a profound impact."

On the product, Dell in the acquisition of force 10 9 months after the formal listing of Dell Force MXL switch, in the continuation of force 10 of the technology and product concept, MXL switch also allows Dell to further achieve the data center "high integration."

Force MXL: Achieving a data center "high integration"

Dell Force MXL Switch is the industry's first 40GB blade switch product after Dell acquired Force 10 based on its technology, with FTOs technical support, and as a complement to the force super performance overhead switch, Dell optimizes speed, efficiency, etc. This makes it the most performance and integrated 40Gb blade switch in the Dell m1000e Blade server chassis.

Li Haiping says Force MXL switches can improve performance in data centers, reduce latency, reduce the number of ports on the Tor rack switch, reduce cabling requirements and complexity, simplify infrastructure with DCB and FCOE standard protocols, and integrate storage networks and data networks, Help businesses build end-to-end Gigabit solutions for data centers. Dell Force MXL Switch
As a high-performance and full-featured 1/10/40gbe second and third layer switch blades, Force MXL provides up to 32 1GbE or 10GbE internal server connection ports, while the external ports provide 2X40GBE fixed ports and two optional flex I/O modules. The stack is implemented through a 40GbE port. MXL Use FTOs system
Dell offers Rich flex I/O options for the MXL switch, including 4-Port SFP, 10gbase-t or qsep+ modules, and a rich 40GbE QSFP transceiver and cable. At the same time, its Ethernet stacking technology enables up to 6 switching modules to be supported within the m1000e Blade chassis and is managed uniformly through Dell's Openmanager. In the "Small and medium distributed core architecture" shown by Li Haiping, we can see that MXL is a distributed core through the stacking technology between chassis and Wan Shao 40G interconnection with S4810 and Z9000. Implement six switches in m1000e with Dell Force MXL switch MXL can be stacked out of the box through a daisy chain

According to Dell's product manager, Openmanager 5.1 will be able to manage MXL switches in a comprehensive way, including monitoring, discovery, deployment, and early warning. All management functions required by OM5.1 are provided within the MXL, and OpenManager5.1 is completely free in the management of more than 10 units, Li Haiping says "This is one of the biggest differences between Dell and other vendors."

And from the data presented by Li Haiping, we can profoundly appreciate the profound effect of Force 10 on Dell's enterprise-class business, whether it is a more converged network or a m1000e new application experience, Force 10 makes Dell's Datacenter architecture template more integrated.

From m1000e itself, the appearance of the MXL switch is the last link of m1000e high integration. Dell launched the One-fourth-high M420 blade Server this year, along with the first enterprise-class storage blade (Gao Diquan) EqualLogic ps-m4110, and with the advent of MXL, the 40GbE DCB Blade switch, Dell implemented the M1000E Blade chassis "server, 10GbE End-to-end Integrated High integration blades for storage, network, and not only Dell's integrated 10G Network, computing and storage milestones, but also Dell's highest-fusion blade data Center.

Although the simple calculation can see that the MXL connection ability far surpasses the m420+ps-4110 server and the storage platform the demand, but the network equipment "always ahead" is objectively existent, but from another angle, along with the solid state storage, the high density computation development, m1000e on the internet is also a proactive thing to do.

With Dell's Force MXL switch, Dell has further converged computing, storage, and networking, and the Force 10 switch will also be gaining access to Dell's integrated system Vstart.

FCoE Fusion Scheme

In terms of external integration, the Dell Force MXL switch can further help Dell achieve external computing and storage integration, such as aggregation LAN, iSCSI storage and rack-top solutions, FCoE converged Network Solutions, small and medium distributed core architectures, and integration with Cisco Private protocol environments.

With the MXL switch, Dell will achieve a solution for computing and storage integration through a converged network solution that is fully proprietary, with M1000E servers on the LAN and EqualLogic iSCSI storage systems, aggregated through force S4810 overhead switches. Not limited to ISCSI,FCOE/FC storage also enables the use of FCoE aggregation Lan/san solutions through the tor overhead switch, including the third party Tor switch. Force 10 most important distributed core architecture

Either way, Dell through the MXL switch is exactly saying that the Force 10 network solution enables a data center fusion solution entirely based on its own products, as well as a highly integrated blade solution, which is a major step forward for Dell in its enterprise-class business.

So "the acquisition of force 10 is of extraordinary significance to Dell." ”