Eighteen months of planning, identifying candidate solutions, writing business and technology requirements, building test plans and finally testing hardware have transpired. We have successfully proven all fabrics tested have the capabilities we need. All tasks can be accomplished on all platforms, and all features, functions, and protocols required from a modern data center function appropriately for our usecases. This turns out to be quite a conundrum. In every architecture bake off I have previously participated in, there was usually a clear winner. There was a solitary product which clearly solved a majority of the business or technology problems and others that did not. For the first time we had four products, and all four solutions by any any technical measure go above and beyond our requirements.
We found ourselves in an odd place. We have to make and defend our decision. To do that, we need to actually determine how to qualify and quantify why we preferred our choice. And when asked what the differences were, it really came down to the philosophical approach each manufacturer took to solving higher level problems we face in the data center of tomorrow. I use tomorrow–not today–for good reason. Continue reading
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