Intel Announces Open Fibre Channel Over Ethernet

sofar writes "Intel has just announced and released source code for their Open-FCoE project, which creates a transport allowing native Fibre Channel frames to travel over ordinary ethernet cables to any Linux system. This extremely interesting development will mean that data centers can lower costs and maintenance by reducing the amount of Fibre Channel equipment and cabling while still enjoying its benefits and performance. The new standard is backed by Cisco, Sun, IBM, EMC, Emulex, and a variety of others working in the storage field. The timing of this announcement comes as no surprise given the uptake of 10-Gb Ethernet in the data center."

Comments

Speed?

[Chrisq]

As far as I can see this is a way of bridging fibre channels over Ethernet. This does not necessarily mean that you will get fibre-like speed (throughput or latency). I am sure that this will have some use, but it does not mean that high performance data-centres will just be able to use Ethernet instead of fibre.

Re:Speed?

[farkus888]

I am not too sure about the latency, but I don't know of any storage solution that can saturate 10 Gb sustained speeds. except maybe something like gigabytes array of ram as a hd system. simply reducing the number of drives on a daisy chain should keep you running happily as far as throughput goes.

Re:Speed?

[afidel]

According to this netapp paper even NFS over 10GbE is lower latency than 4Gb FC. I imagine if the processing overhead isn't too high or offload cards become available then this would be significantly faster than 4Gb FC. As far as bandwidth 10>4 even with the overhead of ethernet framing, especially if you can stand the latency of packing two or more FC frames into an ethernet jumbo frames.

Re:Speed?

[afidel]

Huh? Our piddly 150 spindle SAN could keep a 10Gb link saturated no problem if we had a workload that needed it. In fact that's less than 7MB/s per drive, about one tenth of what these drives are capable of for bulk reads or about one fifth for bulk writes. Even for totally random I/O 150 spindles could probably keep that sized pipe filled.

Re:Speed?

[Intron]

Umm. The paper says that the test load was sequential reads entirely cached in memory, so not exactly an unbiased test.

10GE is a heck of a lot cheaper

[afidel]

As long as a server is within the distance limit of copper, 10GE is about 3-4x cheaper then even 2Gb FC. We've also had a heck of a lot more stability out of our 6500 series switches then we have out of our 9140's and the 9500's are extremely expensive if you have a need for under 3 cards worth of ports.

Re:High End customers will not go to this.

[afidel]

Latency and bandwidth are comparable for copper and fiber ethernet solutions today, the drawback to copper is you need to be within 15m of the switch. This isn't so bad in a small datacenter but in a larger facility you would either need switches all over the place (preferably in 2's for redundant path) or you'd need to go fiber which eliminates a good percentage of the cost savings. FiberChannel used to have copper as a low cost option but it's not there in the 4Gb world and even in the 2Gb space it was so exotic that there was almost no cost savings due to lack of economies of scale.

Re:Srsly, FC or iSCSI?

[onemorechip]

It doesn't *deliver* packets in order (at least, not unless the underlying network does). It provides the capability to reconstruct the original order. GP was talking about *delivery* of packets.