What is Fibre Channel over Ethernet?
FCoE is a new standard ratified in 2009 that allows Fibre Channel (FC) traffic to run over a 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) network. It does this by encapsulating FC frames into Ethernet frames. A frame is a unit of digital transmission that includes a header with address information, together with a packet, the unit of formatted data being transported. By encapsulating complete FC frames directly within the Ethernet payload, FCoE avoids the overhead of any intermediate protocols.
In data centres today both disparate types of networks are used, FC for storage area networking (SAN) and Ethernet for local area networking (LAN). Ethernet’s ubiquity in enterprise and SMB (small and medium business) networks, together with its relative low cost make it a sensible choice to run FC over. However, until the introduction of 10GbE the performance of Ethernet could not match or exceed that of FC, currently 8 Gb/s. Also required was the development of Enhanced Ethernet (EE), sometimes referred to as Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) or Lossless Ethernet to overcome a drawback with standard Ethernet, whereby frames are dropped as part of its management of congested networks. This is fine for Internet Protocol (IP) traffic, but not for storage traffic, which requires a reliable lossless service. Running FC over Enhanced Ethernet provides a lossless environment.
FCoE is designed to use the same operational mode as native FC technology, which means services such as discovery; world-wide name (WWN) addressing, zoning and LUN masking all operate the same way in FCoE as they do in native FC. So, the advantages of FCoE to IT managers is it lets them maintain their existing investments in FC SAN technology and at the same time, by running FC traffic over 10GbE enables the convergence of network technologies. This improves Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), by using a single infrastructure for data and storage networking with common hardware for multiple network traffic types. Plus further direct cost savings are gained by eliminating different management tools and systems for separate networks.
Key FCoE benefits include:
- Fewer interface cards per server
- Reduction in data centre cabling
- Fewer access layer switches
- Flexible performance management
- Power and cooling savings
- Seamless integration with existing FC infrastructure
- Seamless management integration
With end-to-end FCoE storage systems and fabric becoming available, data centres can implement fully converged networks from server to storage that can utilise the benefits of FCoE, iSCSI and 10GbE over one single network.
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