The data center network is the foundation for IT organizations to achieve their infrastructure goals. Today, IT is faced with the challenge of building more scalable, dynamic network infrastructures to support increased agility and faster time-to-market for new applications, while at the same time meeting a growing set of business and regulatory requirements for security and continuity of operations.

Many of the solutions that will enable a new generation of data center network architectures are available today, but there are also many questions to be answered:

• How can I incrementally and modularly scale my network without compromising the integrity of my physical and logical design?
• What is the impact of server consolidation and virtualization on my network, and how can I future-proof my design to support these new architectures?
• What are the considerations for supporting IP-based storage traffic, including Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) and Internet SCSI (iSCSI)?
• How do I enforce—and scale—both perimeter and intra-domain security without causing an uncontrolled proliferation of appliances?
• How do I design a network that is ready to support the next-generation solutions that will allow me to manage TCO by consolidating, virtualizing, and automating the provisioning of application resources?
• How will all of this impact heat, energy, cooling, and space (HECS), and how can I mitigate that impact?

The Firefly Data Center Network solution is based on the Cisco® Intelligent Information Network (IIN) architecture. Based on the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series of modular switches, this solution uses Cisco’s innovative Service Module framework to integrate security, application load-balancing, and network monitoring services into the network chassis, increasing deployment flexibility and controlling proliferation of appliances.

This solution allows you to scale your network services in an incremental and low-risk manner, using best-practice principles, guidelines, and blueprints that have been tested in labs and thousands of real-world deployments.