ACADEMIA

In its current form, DCB/FCoE offers valuable I/O consolidation for racks of single-rack-unit or blade servers running new converged network adapters (CNAs). Emerging FCoE switches behave effectively as top-of-the-rack aggregators, distributing data traffic to either legacy LAN or SAN infrastructure. The performance characteristics promised by this technology -- low latency and 10 to 40Gb/s bandwidth -- are intriguing. (Figure 3)

The enthusiasm for FCoE is tempered by several factors. First, the protocol is far from proven in the kind of demanding, large-scale deployment that is typical of high-performance computing. Secondly, there are multiple issues with FCoE in relation to distance. Today there are no products available that support the implementation of Inter-switch Links (ISLs) among geographically dispersed DCB/FCoE switches. Multi-hop support and congestion and flow control is still forthcoming so the ability to natively connect the technology across 100 kilometers or more has not been demonstrated. Finally, very few storage vendors offer native FCoE storage interfaces. This means that Fibre Channel will play an even more important role as a transport between data centers and FCoE blade servers.