News

posted on 14 February 2008 09:25

---

A common addressing standard has been selected for the emerging Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCOE) standard. This will enable suppliers to build products to a single standard and gives the green light to developers of such products.

FCOE refwers to the transmission of Fibre Channel (FC) protocol over an Ethernet link. FC is used in storage area networks (SANs) as a means of linking accessing servers and storage devices across a fabric of cables and switches all using the Fibre Channel standard. This means that servers wishing to access the SAN have to be fitted with FC host bus adapters (HBAs) and FC cabling in addition to the universal Erhernet cabling required.

FCOE enables the FC signals, and included data, to be carried over Ethernet, making SAN access much less expensive for non-FC-equipped servers.

Chris Lyon, Executive Director of the FCIA, pointed out: "FCoE promises to provide data center managers with a converged network, combining both Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabrics, which will simplify management and provide greater efficiencies.”

However, it's likely that only high-speed Ethernet and a modified Ethernet will be used for FCOE as a more predictable data transmission is required for FC signals than for ordinary Ethernet sugnals. This has been referred to as Data centre Ethernet by supplierrs such as Brocade.

A common addressing structure enables industry participants to build products that interoperate. It is supported by the following Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) members: Amphenol Corporation, Broadcom, Brocade, Cisco Systems, Corning Cable Systems, EMC, Emulex Corporation, Finisar Corporation, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel Corporation, LSI, Mellanox Technologies, NetApp, Nuova Systems, PMC-Sierra, QLogic Corporation and TrueFocus, Inc.

User benefits of this technology include:
- Seamless extension and protection of existing storage investments
- Lower, long-term operating costs via consolidated connectivity and management
- A management model consistent with that used in Fibre Channel SANs
- A unified data center fabric that meets the reliability, latency, and performance requirements for storage and broader data center connectivity
- Additional server connectivity options for more cost-effective data center networking
- Reduction in multiple server I/O and parallel network infrastructure commonly used in data centers.

The FCOE standard will permit existing Fibre Channel investments by customers and suppliers to continue while enabling the gradual substitution of cheaper Ethernet cabling in SANs. The existing iSCSI protocol, which also uses Ethernet, does not natively enable access to a FC SAN unless there is some kind of bridging device between the iSCSI SAN and the FC SAN.

Additional information on FCoE is available on the FCIA website: http://www.FibreChannel.org/FCoE.html.