FCoE and HCL IP
Published Date:
Jul 22, 2009Abstract
The primary benefit of FCoE is network consolidation. Instead of separate FC HBAs for storage traffic and Ethernet NICs for corporate network traffic, the servers need a single Ethernet NIC. Since FCoE is a tunneling layer for FC, FC management concepts such as zoning and WWN still apply. This simplifies management as the administrator continues to see FC attributes everywhere in the topology.
Excerpts from the Paper
FCoE requires enhancements to Ethernet for loss-less transport. TCP/IP adds latency and overhead to frames; not a difficult issue for traffic created for IP networks, but a serious problem for Fibre Channel frames in high performance environments. Running Fibre Channel over layer 2 Ethernet would avoid TCP/IP overhead, and CEE would provide the lossless environment that the Fibre Channel SAN requires. The other new features include robust congestion management, ability to prioritize Fibre Channel traffic over non-Fibre Channel traffic and frame latency comparable to Fibre Channel.
