14 DAY TRIAL // One of the most popular technologies used by companies with high capacity data storage requirements is the Fibre Channel. It is a means of connecting servers to storage devices through a network of cables and switches, not to forget server adapter cards and systems administrators. The task at hand is to create a new technology specification called Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) which is to be approved by the T11 Committee of American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
The standard would allow SAN traffic to be transported over Ethernet networks, though not through the use of the Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) which is now being used by the iSCSI network protocol standard to create Storage Area Networks. FCoE has another proprietary technology it uses to achieve the same goal. The usage of FCoE will be possible within the same timeframe as the 10 Gigabit per second Ethernet standard will appear on the market, somewhere in 2009. It's also believed that conventional Fibre Channel will not replace as of yet the Ethernet version, both of them having to share the market for some time.
As a part of the support "team" for this standard we encounter industry leading vendors including Brocade, Cisco, EMC, Emulex Corp., IBM, Intel, Nuova, QLogic and Sun Microsystems. Among the many uses and benefits of this technology, the following are some of them: "Seamless extension and protection of existing 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."