• The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
Menu
  • The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Vendors Propose Fibre Channel Over Ethernet Standard

    April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    I don’t recall who said it first, but I know it wasn’t me as much as I know it to be absolutely true: Any protocol that comes up against Ethernet eventually loses. It was probably Bob Metcalf, the creator of Ethernet and the founder of 3Com. Fibre Channel is feeling the burn indirectly from iSCSI, and rather than take on Ethernet directly, its proponents have now come up with a truce: Run Fibre Channel protocols over Ethernet.

    Ethernet, which was conceived back in 1973 by Metcalf, is an amazingly resilient technology. Token Ring, IBM‘s network topology and electronics that it married to Systems Network Architecture software, came up against Ethernet and the TCP/IP protocol directly, and after a gigantic struggle that culminated in the Internet, Token Ring was banished to oblivion. So were Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), earlier high-speed protocols for network backbones, once Ethernet caught up in the bandwidth race. InfiniBand was supposed to beat Ethernet and become the standard for linking systems to each other and to storage in a switched fabric; that sure didn’t happen, although InfiniBand does have some good niche uses in high performance supercomputing and in database clustering (but, alas, not for long if history is any guide). The SCSI protocol and wiring that is used to link peripherals to machines has been extended to work over Ethernet links with iSCSI, and as Ethernet networks go from Gigabit Ethernet (GE) to 10 Gigabit (10GE), 40 Gigabit (40GE), and even 100 Gigabit (100GE) links, it is clear that this simple and relatively inexpensive way of linking to external storage (thanks to the ubiquity of Ethernet hardware) is going to take off. And that, perhaps, is why the people behind the Fibre Channel protocol, which is used to link servers to storage area networks, are now talking about extending the Fibre Channel protocol so it can run over Ethernet. Better to embrace Ethernet than to face being banished to oblivion by iSCSI.

    A group of storage vendors, including Brocade, Cisco Systems, EMC, Emulex, IBM, Intel, Nuova, QLogic, and Sun Microsystems, have put together a technology specification proposal that they have submitted to the American National Standards Institute to create a standard called Fibre Channel over Ethernet, or FCoE.

    With FCoE, customers who have made a big investment in Fibre Channel SAN storage gear would be able to link them back to servers using Ethernet cabling rather than Fibre Channel light pipes, which are more expensive. The Fibre Channel protocols are widely recognized as being more resilient than iSCSI, and have a lot of sophisticated features for data multipathing and error scrubbing.

    Once again, a technology is being heralded as the unifying data center fabric. Maybe this time, because we are talking about Ethernet, it will actually happen.



                         Post this story to del.icio.us
                   Post this story to Digg
        Post this story to Slashdot

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Tags: Tags: mtfh_rc, Volume 16, Number 15 -- April 16, 2007

    Sponsored by
    FalconStor

    Begin Your Journey to the Cloud with Hybrid Cloud Date Protection and Disaster Recovery

    FalconStor StorSafe optimizes and modernizes your IBM i on-premises and in the IBM Power Virtual Server Cloud

    FalconStor powers secure and encrypted IBM i backups on-premise and now, working with IBM, powers migration to the IBM PowerVS cloud and on-going backup to IBM cloud object storage.

    Now you can use the IBM PowerVS Cloud as your secure offsite copy and take advantage of a hybrid cloud architecture or you can migrate workloads – test & development or even production apps – to the Power VS Cloud with secure cloud-native backup, powered by FalconStor and proven IBM partners.

    Learn More

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Admin Alert: The Process and Pitfalls of Duplicating Libraries Oracle Declares a ‘Renaissance’ for J.D. Edwards World

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

TFH Volume: 16 Issue: 15

This Issue Sponsored By

    Table of Contents

    • Massive $74 Billion Consolidation in the ERP Space
    • Virtualization Can Hurt Security, Gartner Says
    • New 36 GB, 4mm Tape Drive Fills In the VXA Gap for i5 Servers
    • Vendors Propose Fibre Channel Over Ethernet Standard
    • Lawson Sees Red Ink In Fiscal Third Quarter
    • Massive $74 Billion Consolidation in the ERP Space
    • IBM Executives’ iSociety Chat: Direct Sales and a Developer Price Point
    • System i and the Web: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going
    • Wheeling and Dealing to Move System i Iron
    • IBM Upgrades High-End System i5 Servers

    Content archive

    • The Four Hundred
    • Four Hundred Stuff
    • Four Hundred Guru

    Recent Posts

    • To Comfort The Afflicted And Afflict The Comfortable
    • How FalconStor Is Reinventing Itself, And Why IBM Noticed
    • Guru: When Procedure Driven RPG Really Works
    • Vendors Fill In The Gaps With IBM’s New MFA Solution
    • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 27
    • With Power11, Power Systems “Go To Eleven”
    • With Subscription Price, IBM i P20 And P30 Tiers Get Bigger Bundles
    • Izzi Buys CNX, Eyes Valence Port To System Z
    • IBM i Shops “Attacking” Security Concerns, Study Shows
    • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 26

    Subscribe

    To get news from IT Jungle sent to your inbox every week, subscribe to our newsletter.

    Pages

    • About Us
    • Contact
    • Contributors
    • Four Hundred Monitor
    • IBM i PTF Guide
    • Media Kit
    • Subscribe

    Search

    Copyright © 2025 IT Jungle