Yesterday I read a white-paper by Brocade on their new technology concept called the "Ethernet Fabric". This technology allows FC protocol frames to travel within Ethernet packets (FCoE).
Fantastic!!! But what does this mean?
Currently the Fibre Channel protocol which is commonly used in SAN environments is "only" capable of speeds up to 8Ggps however its neighboring Ethernet protocol can now produce speeds of up to 10Gbps.
That's all well and good but you may be asking what the right solution is for you FCoE or iSCSI at 10Gbps?
Ultimately, this will depend on current infrastructure within the business along with what white-papers your technical architect has been exposed to. I believe the technology still needs time to mature as the capital expenses for a re-fit like this would be substantial, however the cost savings of only only maintaining one set of network architecture going forward are a big selling point.
To date I have worked with numerous iSCSI & Fibre Channel connected storage arrays and over the years have seen each protocol shine as the preferred solution for SAN connectivity. Personally my bets are on FCoE as most technology movements these days are based around integration, single console management and of course speed.
In today's market place there are two "main" vendors playing in the FCoE space - Cisco Nexus & Brocade VDX
The VDX series by Brocade comes loaded with their new Virtual Cluster Switching firmware, which allows up to 10 switches to be clustered together (fabric) and managed under a single interface.
With this firmware supporting the ability to use multiple ISL's (inter switch links) at once using self aggregation, the effective bandwidth is scalable to 600 10Gbit/sec.
In typical layer 2 switched Ethernet environments, 2 x protocols are required to ensure consistency and performance. These are: STP (Spanning tree Protocol) which is required to prevent switching loops along multiple ISL's and LAG's (link aggregation groups) to help achieve higher bandwidth between ISL's by pooling links together. All of this is left in the dust with "Ethernet Fabric" where almost any topology is supported.. Mesh, Ring, tree or core/edge!
The days of complete physical separation between LAN & SAN networks are numbered!
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