By Monique Lucey
The explosion in research data is a bi-product of the information age and higher education has led the way in making this possible. Educause recently conducted a study on the effects on colleges and universities and the ways their IT organizations deal with it. This study, “Institutional Data Management in Higher Education” looked at the challenges facing institutions across three areas of data impact: operational information, content and research data.
Research data presents a challenge relating to ownership, preservation and interpretation. Additionally there is an ongoing debate about how to store, share and properly manage this rapidly increasing broad body of data. The expanding universe of research data has led to the explosion of servers, virtual machines, Gigabit Ethernet NIC I/O, cabling, space, power etc., resulting in high complexity/cost and poor performance (mostly in the access layer of the network).
The good news for data center operators is that a network migration to 10 Gigabit Ethernet offers many near term and real benefits in support of the ever increasing data demands. For starters – 10 Gigabit Ethernet delivers 10 times the bandwidth of Gigabit Ethernet. In high performance computing environments that often use as many as four to eight Gigabit Ethernet NICs in each server, organizations can deploy just two 10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs and achieve full redundancy for availability – while dramatically increasing bandwidth per virtual machine.
From a network design and operational perspective, consolidating on 10 Gigabit Ethernet network dramatically reduces the number of Gigabit Ethernet ports, NICs, upstream switch ports and cables – which equates to a simpler, flatter network design needing fewer access-layer switches. Finally – fewer ports and switches lead to lower power and cooling costs.
Institutions that can get a handle on these challenges before they get out of control, creating bottlenecks and network downtime, will reap the benefits of attracting research grants and the brightest research talent.
“MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics demands a high-performance, high-reliability network infrastructure. We recently upgraded with 3Com’s H3C enterprise switches, allowing us to support the most demanding, bandwidth intensive and mission critical research initiatives. With H3C networking solutions, MIT can deliver a new level of innovation that will ultimately help us to attract funding for our leading-edge research.” Dave Foss, Assistant Director of IT, MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics
Is your institution drowning in research data? If so, how will you ensure that your network infrastructure meets bandwidth demands today and into the future? We want to hear from you.
