Proponents of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) say this new transport mechanism will deliver a number of important benefits to the modern data center, including lower operating costs, ease of deployment, scalability, low latency and high performance. For network and storage managers, it is a familiar refrain.
Technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and InfiniBand were also introduced with a great deal of hype as powerful alternatives to Fibre Channel as storage network fabrics. While each found niche implementations, neither gained widespread traction due to the significant costs associated with replacing an established, efficient technology.
FCoE may be different, however. The FCoE standard enables SAN traffic to be natively transported over Ethernet networks while protecting and extending the investment that customers have made in Fibre Channel. By combining two established and well-understood technologies, FCoE complements today’s existing connectivity and protocols used in storage and data center networking, and offers the possibility of consolidated server I/O connectivity in the data center.
Catching On
A recently published report by Dell'Oro Group indicates that approximately 7 percent of servers, or 150,000 units, shipped with FCoE-capable network connections in the first quarter of 2011.
“Since FCoE will be a key data center technology, continued investment in this sector should bode well for the technology,” said Seamus Crehan, vice president of Dell’Oro Group. “New data center technologies and deployment models that have compelling return on investment prospects have resulted in increased investment in the data center.”
Many industry experts believe FCoE’s ultimate value lies in its ability to drive data center consolidation, virtualization and automation as a unified data center fabric. With the ability to support both Fibre Channel and IP-based protocols over a common link layer transport, FCoE could potentially form the basis for a single, converged network that supports all of an organization’s application and messaging traffic.
All Together Now
Today, the typical data center supports multiple networks — one for data and applications, one for storage, and perhaps another for server clustering. As such, servers must feature multiple network adapters that fulfill the I/O requirements of each function. What’s more, servers commonly have dedicated interfaces for management, backup or virtual machine live migration.
Supporting all of these interfaces contributes significantly to data center complexity and imposes significant costs related to cabling, rack space and upstream switches. In addition, the rat’s nest of different cables and connections required for each different function makes it harder to heat and cool the data center and contributes to skyrocketing power costs.
FCoE could be the key protocol in delivering the unified fabric that can aggregate I/O and server resources with a “wire-once” interconnect — a single high-bandwidth, low-latency network cable running from server to switch to storage. In addition to reducing the number of server adapters, cables and switches required to support the data center, the unified fabric would support broader data center virtualization by providing consistent, ubiquitous network and storage services to all connected devices.
In a significant milestone for the progression of the FCoE protocol, three technology heavyweights — Cisco, NetApp and VMware — recently announced the first certified end-to-end FCoE solution for virtual environments. Cisco data center switches and NetApp storage FCoE solutions are now validated by VMware to support VMware-based virtualized environments.
