News

posted on 18 July 2008 14:53

Fourteen vendors are ready to start shipping FCOE products and have demo'd that they work.

FCOE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) layers the Fibre Channel protocol over Ethernet and enables a convergence of Fibre Channel and other protocols onto Ethernet, thus providing a unified data center fabric.

QLogic, Cisco and NetApp validated that Fibre Channel over Ethernet technology is ready for adoption by end users. A total of 14 storage, server and software vendors ran device drivers, device management software, network management software, storage management software and business applications on an FCoE network. Participants found their hardware products and software applications easily recognized Fibre Channel and FCoE devices because the FCoE network appeared to their products as just another Fibre Channel network.

Other FCoE Test Drive participants included Computer Associates, DataDirect Networks, EMC, FalconStor, Finisar, HP, Infortrend, LSI, Microsoft, MiraLink, Promise Technology and Symantec.

The missing elephants in this FCOE room are, of course, Brocade and Emulex.

Dennis Martin, founder and president of computer industry analyst firm Demartek, a third party auditor of the test drive, said: “In our opinion, FCoE is ready to be tested by those customers that want to run their storage traffic over a single, 10Gb converged fabric. During the FCoE Test Drive, we found that all applications ran correctly, unaware of any difference in the underlying hardware interface. While we recognize that enterprise infrastructures take a number of years to change and some minor protocol issues still need to be resolved, we believe that FCoE will soon take its place as a viable, stable enterprise-ready protocol, especially as enterprises consider and deploy 10Gb Enhanced Ethernet networks.”

The 'minor protocol issues' might be a way of referring to the missing ingredient in the FCOE recipe: data centre class Ethernet (DCE or CEE) which doesn't lose packets of data and has congestion control to stop Fibre Channel devices finding packet delivery time exceeding limits and thinking a link is down. Such a new standard Ethernet is not thought to be likely to be ready until 2010.

Ed Chapman, Cisco product management VP for the Server Access and Virtualisation Business Unit, said: “All FCoE traffic on the test drive went through the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches and ran seamlessly with all the other FCoE products in the test drive. We are very encouraged by the prospects of FCoE market acceptance due to the fact that it is a non-disruptive technology, which customers can deploy at their own pace to unify their network infrastructures, and offers significant savings in adapter and cable investment as well as in power and cooling costs.”

Blade Network Technologies (BNT) and other sources have characterised the Cisco FCOE offering as a fork lift upgrade. BNT says it is the only Ethernet switch supplier that can offer loss-less and predictable latency Ethernet today.

The demonstration is an encouraging proof point that various suppliers of products in the FCOE 'stack' already work well together and are ready to be tested in pilot FCOE initiatives by customers interested in the technology.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}