Fabric convergence implications on systems architecture

Converged fabrics that support data, storage, and cluster networking in a unified fashion are desirable for their cost and manageability advantages. Recent trends towards higher-bandwidths in commodity networks, physical-layer similarities across different communication protocols, and the adoption of blade servers along with the corresponding availability of ‘backplanes’ to implement new networking methods, motivate revisiting this idea. We discuss various aspects of fabric convergence, and present some evaluation results from our experiments in the context of a specific I/O consolidation case study. Based on the insights from these experiments, we discuss opportunities for future research - in new instrumentation and evaluation methods, new cross-layer and application-agnostic designs for fabric convergence solutions, and new system architectures that leverage ensemble-level resource sharing. Our goal, through the discussions in this position paper, is to initiate a more general examination of these issues in the broader academic community.