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

Re:High End customers will not go to this.

[Chris Snook]

Bullshit.

The bandwidth is there. I can get 960 Mb/s sustained application-layer throughput out of a gigabit ethernet connection. When you have pause frame support and managed layer 3 switches, you can strip away the protocol overhead of iSCSI, and keep the reliability and flexibility in a typical data center.

The goal of this project is not to replace fibre channel fabrics, but rather to extend them. For every large database server at your High End customer, there are dozens of smaller boxes that would greatly benefit from centralized disk storage, but for which the cost of conventional FC would negate the benefit. As you've noted, iSCSI isn't always a suitable option.

You're probably right that people won't use this a whole lot to connect to super-high-end disk arrays, but once you hook up an FCoE bridge to your network, you have the flexibility to do whatever you want with it. In some cases, the cost benefit of 10Gb ethernet vs. 2x 4Gb FC alone will be enough motivation to use it even for very high-end work.