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A few years ago, if I had said I was running a "converged network," you might have assumed I had just installed a shiny new network-attached VoIP phone system. Today, convergence has a completely different meaning.
In conventional enterprise data centers, there are at least two networks: one built on Ethernet that allows users to access their applications on servers and a second one, often built on Fibre Channel, that enables those servers to access mountains of data on a storage network. Both of these networks are huge capital investments with their own specialized hardware. They have vastly different management tools and require completely different skill sets to build and maintain.
Wouldn't it be more cost-efficient to have just one network? That's the promise of converged networking: one highly scalable, high-performance network with consistent management tools that can handle both Ethernet and storage traffic.
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