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

Fiber channel

[smittyoneeach]

Fiber channel
In ye olde patch panel
Beats fiber thin
On your chinny-chin-chin
Burma Shave

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?

[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.

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:Bumper cars.

[morgan_greywolf]

Oh this should be interesting. Fibre over a collision-and hold-off architecture. They have this newfanged technology. It's called switched Ethernet! It's amazing! With switched Ethernet, you get no collisions!

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:0D:03:01:04
                    inet addr:192.168.1.100 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
                    inet6 addr: fe80::000:00f0:0043:0084/64 Scope:Link
                    UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
                    RX packets:1781638 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
                    TX packets:1651683 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
                    collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
                    RX bytes:803882935 (766.6 MiB) TX bytes:333706343 (318.2 MiB)
                    Interrupt:18 Base address:0xd800


(address details fudged only)

Re:High End customers will not go to this.

[totally bogus dude]

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?

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:I'm more interested in AoE

[Hal_Porter]

You should give it a snappier name like Serial ATA Networking, or SATAN. Lots of interesting logo possibilities in that, and it'll be funny watching 'technology evangelist' types stutter, sweat and mumble when they give PowerPoint presentations to born again potential customers.