Surgient’s virtual datacenter leverages virtualization technology from Microsoft and VMware. And as the company’s list of hosted customers continues to grow, so too must its datacenter. Even though its datacenter is itself virtualized, the company has to deal with increased scale without compromising performance.

To help solve that problem, Surgient looked outside of its organization and found Woven Systems and their Ethernet fabric switching solutions based on the company’s patented vSCALE technology for datacenters and high-performance computing clusters.

Surgient chose Woven’s technology to upgrade its datacenter to 10 Gigabit Ethernet using Woven’s EFX 1000 Ethernet Fabric Switch. With only a single EFX 1000 switch, Surgient is able to interconnect all of its virtualized servers and its storage area network in its datacenter. So why did Surgient choose Woven Systems?

“We looked at Ethernet switches from multiple providers, and Woven’s Ethernet fabric provided the most impressive performance,” said Evan Watkins, director of operations at Surgient.

“Dynamic datacenter environments that make extensive use of virtualization have dynamic networking requirements. As virtual machines are moved around to different virtualization hosts as part of normal operational tasks, the networking load shifts with them, changing the load on various switches in the environment. In a traditional networking environment using spanning tree protocol, it is normal to manually plan that load shift, making sure that the intermediate distribution layer switches have sufficient bandwidth and uplink capacity to handle the loads. With the Woven Systems EFX-1000, it dynamically adjusts the load on the various paths in its internal fabric, avoiding bottlenecks and optimizing throughput without any operational efforts on our part.”

In a typical virtualized datacenter, it is critical to have a reliable SAN environment. However, it can prove to be extremely expensive for most organizations to build out a Fibre channel storage network system along with a Gigabit network environment. And Surgient’s hosted facility is no exception.

Watkins said, “With the Woven Systems switch we have a reliable, high speed, multi-path, load balancing iSCSI storage network but only have one type of network to manage. We didn’t have to deploy a Fibre channel storage network. We didn’t have to hire or build Fibre channel networking skills on our datacenter team. This saved us a considerable amount in capital and operational expenses.”

“Surgient’s deployment proves it is now possible to build an all-Ethernet datacenter that scales without compromising performance,” says Joseph Ammirato, vice president of marketing at Woven. “They’ve amassed an impressive and growing list of customers that demand the mission-critical reliability afforded by Woven’s Ethernet fabric.”

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