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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."
I expect you're right, but it's interesting to note they're referring to this as Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and not over IP. The reduction in overhead there (not just packet size, but avoiding the whole IP stack) might be enough to really help; and if you're running separate 10 Gigabit Ethernet for the storage subsystem (i.e. not piggy backing on an existing IP network) it might be really nice. Or at least, comparable in performance and a heck of a lot cheaper.
On the other hand, really decent switches that can cope with heavy usage of 10-GigE without delaying packets at all aren't going to be massively cheap, and you'd need very high quality NICs in all the servers as well. Even then, fibre's still probably going to be faster than copper... but that's just something I made up. Maybe someone who knows more about the intricacies of transmitting data over each can enlighten us all?
There was recently an article about "storing" data within fibre as sound rather than converting it to for storage in electrical components, since the latter is kind of slow; how does this compare to transmission via current over copper?