Vendors Propose Fibre Channel Over Ethernet Standard

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With Fibre Channel in place and iSCSI gaining ground on the IP front, why the need for FCoE?

“Today we have separate networks for storage and traffic in the data center,” Brian Garrett an analyst is Enterprise Strategy Group, said. “For enterprise-class applications, FC is the king. For general purpose networking, Ethernet rules.”

The problem that each is managed differently by different groups and require separate tools for configuration and monitoring. “Clearly a converged fabric would reduce cost and complexity,” Garrett said.

Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing at Emulex, said server virtualization and bladeservers are two of the driving forces behind the proposed protocol. As those technologies become more commonly deployed in data centers, FCoE will consolidate storage for those servers on a SAN. For example, Smith said, “Blade servers not designed to manage storage.”

FCoE is expected to enable SAN traffic to be natively transported over Ethernet networks, while protecting and extending the investment enterprises have made in storage networks. The proposal for a new direct mapping of Fibre Channel over Ethernet has the support Brocade, Cisco, EMC, Emulex Corp., IBM, Intel, Nuova, QLogic and Sun Microsystems.

Fibre Channel was originally designed for new mass storage devices and other peripheral devices that require very high bandwidth — more than Ethernet historically has provided. Fibre Channel supports full-duplex data transfer rates of 100MBps. However, Ethernet is becoming more attractive for storage neworks as its speed continues to increase thanks to standards such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

FCoE would allow enterprises to continue to run Fibre Channel over the same wires as their data networks. The goal, according to the companies proposing FCoE, is to reduce management complexity, reduce time to deployment, lower capital and operating costs, and lower power utilization.

According to the companies, FCoE will provide a unified fabric that’s designed to meet the reliability, latency and performance requirements for storage and broader data center connectivity. The group described today’s announcement as the first of many steps toward the development of this future standard.

With Fibre Channel locked in on the high-end and iSCSI gain ground of the low-end, FCoE will fit in between the two protocol, Smith said, as a mid-tier solution.

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