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I have been evaluating converged storage/data networking for some time. It seems that the design pitched by vendors is a bridging of the Fiber Channel (FC) and Ethernet domains. I always come away questioning if this is just some interim step towards a pure FCoE storage networking environment. Some vendors are pushing towards end-to-end FCoE, but it seems that there may be scalability concerns. I find it difficult to take any step toward FCoE while there is an existing investment in FC. It probably makes more sense for a greenfield deployment.

Is end-to-end FCoE still in its infancy? If so, does it make sense to wait for it to mature and jump straight to a pure FCoE storage environment?

Craig Constantine
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Dennis Olvany
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2 Answers2

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I think it's mature enough for production use. However, it's not an all-or-nothing thing. Right now the only major FCoE (multi-hop) vendor is Cisco. They're pitching a Fibre Channel fabric where it doesn't matter if the ports are FC or FCoE. Some ports might be 8 Gbit FC, others might be 10 Gbit Ethernet running FCoE.

You can have an FC-connected storage array, connected to a Nexus 5K, using a Nexus 7K as your core (or MDS with FCoE cards), aggregating down to another 5K, to a UCS B-Series connected via FCoE.

Brocade is a native FC shop, and they've been pushing 16 Gbit FC for I think 2 years. Cisco just announced a 16 Gbit FC switch, so they're a little later to the 16 Gbit game, though they've been pushing 10 Gbit Ethernet FCoE for about as long.

Also, 10 Gbit Ethernet is about 1250 MBytes of raw throughput, where 16 Gbit FC is 1600 Mbyte/s of raw throughput, because of the way FC was designed.

Dave Noonan
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user429
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FCoE is a very viable and reliable solution for converged infrastructure and cutting costs and management of hardware. I have personally helped architect FCoE solutions for many companies. FCoE end-to-end currently is not a viable solution and many storage providers do not provide support for this. In any case, FCoE with a backend SAN infrastructure already in place is going to be the most common use case. Also, with a converged network switch it is also possible to go to ToR with FCoE and have the converged switch connect directly to storage.

With that said Dell, Cisco, Brocade and Juniper all provide converged switches. I work at Dell Networking so will leave it up to you to do the research. I have written several posts on Dell Networking with regards to FCoE on my blog. In short, some viable solutions can be: Dell S5000, Cisco Nexus 5548UP or 5596UP, Brocade VDX 6720 or 6730, and Juniper QFX3500.

Humair Ahmed
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