Indiana University is putting the 6600 through its paces in preparation for building a new data center. It currently has two, which support about 1,700 servers.

"As we started looking at our requirements, it made a lot of sense for us to move from and end-of-rack switching model to a top-of-rack switching model," says Matt Davy, chief network architect for the university. "The 6600 has a lot of interesting features for top-of-rack."

Indiana University is also evaluating Cisco Nexus 5000s for this application. The school is implementing a top-of-rack architecture to lower the cost of increasing gigabit densities that server virtualization presents, as well as an eventual migration to 10G Ethernet, Davy says.

"Doing 10G at top-of-rack is definitely more cost effective because of the SFP+ direct attached cables reducing your connection cost to the servers," he says.

The server module for HP and 5400 zl switches is called the ProCurve One Services zl Module. It is based on an T7500 Core 2 Duo processor with 4GB of memory, 4GB of flash memory, and a 250GB hard drive.