Intel Announces Open Fibre Channel Over Ethernet 107
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."
Re:High End customers will not go to this. (Score:4, Insightful)
The bandwidth is there. I can get 960 Mb/s sustained application-layer throughput out of a gigabit ethernet connection. When you have pause frame support and managed layer 3 switches, you can strip away the protocol overhead of iSCSI, and keep the reliability and flexibility in a typical data center.
The goal of this project is not to replace fibre channel fabrics, but rather to extend them. For every large database server at your High End customer, there are dozens of smaller boxes that would greatly benefit from centralized disk storage, but for which the cost of conventional FC would negate the benefit. As you've noted, iSCSI isn't always a suitable option.
You're probably right that people won't use this a whole lot to connect to super-high-end disk arrays, but once you hook up an FCoE bridge to your network, you have the flexibility to do whatever you want with it. In some cases, the cost benefit of 10Gb ethernet vs. 2x 4Gb FC alone will be enough motivation to use it even for very high-end work.
Re:Bumper cars. (Score:3, Insightful)
FCOE really does rely on "new fangled technology". More than switched ethernet is required, it has to be an enhanced Ethernet that prevents virtually all congestion related drops.
Work on such features is indeed in progress in both IEEE 802.1 and the IETF. The comparison of FCOE vs. iSCSI in those environments will be a lot more even than the comparisons presented by FCOE champions currently. Those compare storage traffic that requires neither routing or security, and tests FCOE over forthcoming Ethernet vs. iSCSI over current Ethernet.
Those comparisons involve a lot more than wire transport protocols. For example, open-fcoe is a good start, but open-iscsi is a much more mature project.
Re:I'm more interested in AoE (Score:3, Insightful)
ATA, SATA and SAS all have severe connectivity limits. They don't have a way of addressing a large number of devices, running long distances or supporting multiple initiators. While they might be fine for your home they are worthless for the SAN/LAN environment where fibre channel and FCoE are targeted.
Re:Srsly, FC or iSCSI? (Score:2, Insightful)
1) TCP/IP doesn't guarantee in-order delivery of packets (think of stuttering with streaming media, etc...)
2) Frame sizes are smaller and have more overhead than Fibre Channel packets.
3) Most NICs rely on the system to encapsulate & process packets - a smart NIC [TCP Ofload Engine card] costs almost as much as a Fibre Channel card.