Storage vendors including Brocade Communications Systems Inc.,
Cisco Systems Inc., EMC Corp., Emulex Corp., IBM, Intel, Nuova,
QLogic Corp., and Sun Microsystems Inc. are proposing a Fibre
Channel over Ethernet standard to the ANSI T11 standards committee.
The new specification will define the process of adding Fibre
Channel information into Ethernet packets as the "payload"; the new
protocol would be a Layer 3 networking standard that would allow
for the creation of converged networks combining Fibre Channel,
Ethernet, iSCSI and clustered NAS traffic in the data center,
according to Taufik Ma, vice president of marketing in the
intelligent network products division for Emulex.
"A new class of converged adapters would be used in servers" in
order to connect to the FCoE network, he said. Otherwise, servers
would plug into a standard Ethernet network regardless of the
back-end storage.
Key to the convergence, according to Emulex officials, is the
spread of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, which would allow for more bandwidth
to combine protocols on the network. "We expect [10 Gigabit
Ethernet] to be a ubiquitous technology looking out three to five
years," said Mike Smith, VP of worldwide marketing for Emulex. "The
question we're getting asked is how to take advantage of the extra
bandwidth."
Emulex predicts Fibre Channel will remain popular in the very
high end, but said that the converged network is meant to appeal to
small and midsize businesses, particularly as a way to protect
existing Fibre Channel investments as iSCSI grows in
popularity.
From here, once the proposal goes to the standards body, Ma
said, there will probably be an 18-month process before early
products hit the market. "We expect to have standards and products,
which are worked on in parallel to standards, in the 2009
timeframe," Ma said.
According to Stephanie Balouras, senior analyst with Forrester
Research Inc., the 2009 timeframe is probably a realistic one. "10
GB Ethernet is already available today," she said. "It's just very
expensive at the moment, say $3000 to $5000 per port. As the price
continues to decline, I think it will become the dominant
networking technology."
However, Balouras pointed out, the server and application
vendors are conspicuously missing from the standards group. "I'd
like to see Microsoft, Oracle and Linux vendors participate," she
said. "iSCSI really took off when Microsoft threw its weight behind
it with a free iSCSI initiator for download -- any new standard
will only become widely adopted when the operating system and
application vendors support it."
Speaking of standards, a previously proposed FC-SATA standard
(also spearheaded by Emulex) is slated to come to fruition in the
form of product announcements and the release of a finished
standard next week, according to company officials. The FC-SATA
standard is being ratified this week; an announcement is scheduled
for next Wednesday.