Or Fibre Channel over Ethernet. NetApp announced last week providing a convergence-ready, end-to-end 10G infrastructure solution for FCoE.
NetApp has been the leader in Ethernet and TCP/IP-based storage. Redefining the landscape of file services with a unified architecture for UNIX and Windows networking. Later being the largest supplier of iSCSI-based storage solutions in the industry when we introduced iSCSI support for a new standard for block storage access.
In the storage world, the letter 'F' until recently meant Fibre Channel SAN. A separate high performance storage network for deploying critical applications in the data center. NetApp storage supports traditional Fibre Channel SAN solutions, of course. But the emergence of solutions like iSCSI certainly posed the question more forcefully of "Can I get to a single networking infrastructure for my data center?"
FCoE provides a way. The enabling underlying technology is Data Center Bridging, or DCB. The Fibre Channel networking standard provided a reliable physical transport for the encapsulation of SCSI for SAN storage deployments. DCB brings a set of features to Ethernet that finally allows for the physical fabric convergence that has been elusive to date. Two standards bodies were required to drive towards an FCoE solution. The IEEE driving the Ethernet standard, and T11 driving the requirements around the support needed for storage.
In October 2007, NetApp and several partners demonstrated a prototype FCoE solution pointing the way to the product announcements and solutions available today. Much of the direction in FCoE is tied towards the march of Ethernet to 10 Gb/s and beyond.
What does this mean practically to you? As technology is refreshed and you are looking at storage architectures you are now able to look at a single networking infrastructure in your data center. From the storage architect's viewpoint, FCoE provides a storage solution that co-exists with traditional FC-SAN deployments and the simplest path forward toward a single wire standard in the data center. FCoE and FC-SAN can be managed in the same way. From a green perspective, FCoE makes sense. As Ethernet bandwidth continues to leap forward, a single infrastructure can halve the number of ports coming from a host, and reduce the power consumption. All with a physical network that is compatible with TCP/IP, iSCSI and NAS solutions. The convergence-ready aspect of our announcement is that the 10GbE adapter runs FCoE today in initial release, and we are demonstrating and qualifying the other storage protocols now. This makes a lot of sense from many perspectives.
Technology change takes time, standards bodies at their best step in and provide the framework for new products and solutions. Bob Metcalfe, the co-inventor of Ethernet, allegedly quipped once "I don't know what the networking of the future will look like, I only know they will call it Ethernet." (If any reader has any information on whether that quote is true, or where it was first attributed, let me know - because I cannot verify it). It is turning out that not only is that what it will be called, but that it will be Ethernet in actuality also.
I did have the opportunity to meet Metcalfe when he was inducted as a fellow of the Computer History Museum last October. I handed him a bottle of wine as a gift, and when he asked me why I replied "Because of you I have a job. I work at NetApp and we're a leader in networked storage. And Ethernet is the network."
