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IT departments are consolidating servers and implementing virtualization to simplify their environments and lower the total cost of ownership. Some organizations are achieving consolidation ratios of as high as 100:1, and 20:1 consolidation is commonplace, using VMware® and multi-core server technology. But success in reducing the number of servers, and the concomitant reduction in management and environmental costs, has a price: each reduction in physical server presence also subtracts a number of NIC ports. A proliferation of virtual machines on a single server competes for that server's resources, often resulting in I/O bottlenecks.

iSCSI over 10GbE provides the bandwidth needed to handle the increased I/O burden of a consolidated and virtualized server environment—along with the scalability and flexibility to support new servers and storage devices in the future. Organizations moving to 10GbE iSCSI can lower equipment and power costs, consolidate and manage their servers more easily, and increase throughput in their virtual server environment.

For reasons such as these, analysts are predicting a rapid adoption of 10GbE in the next two years. Forrester recommends targeted deployments now, expecting widespread implementation in 2010.

By implementing 10GbE solutions, organizations can enjoy the economies they hoped to obtain by consolidating and virtualizing their server environment, along with increased performance, reliability, security, and ease of use. Dell can assist customers in implementing 10GbE solutions that are right for their environment using products similar to the ones described in this paper.