Emulex unleashes Fibre Channel over Ethernet 20 April, 2008 By Paul Weinberg

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Now, in the testing stage in selected enterprise sites before they will appear in OEM products in a year from now, the vendor's new LightPulse LP21000 family of converged network adapters combines network and storage traffic under one cabling and switching infrastructure or fabric.

"It is the same drivers and management tools; so it is a seamless extension of Fibre Channel over Ethernet if you will," stated Joe Gervais, senior marketing director at Emulex.

The result will be reduced data center complexity, management costs and power consumption, he stated.

"A huge explosion of systems that need connectivity to the SAN is being driven by server virtualization and by blade servers. In both of those cases customers want to put these systems on the SAN to help make the data center more robust. And there is a lot of complexity and a lot of expense with having to build out two fabrics there, one for the storage and one for the networking and this product helps them do that over one fabric."

Gervais estimated that three out of four systems in the data center are currently not on the SAN.

"We expect in the coming years because of blades and server virtualization a move to the SAN. So it is important that there are robust tools that can support very large scale installations."

The long term goal is a converged network of servers and storage that allows users to avoid wiring difficulties and leverage their Fibre Channel investments for reliability, scale and legacy platform, stated Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems research, IDC.

Currently, as data centers expand, the separating wiring infrastructures for servers and storage can turn into a huge hassle from an efficiency perspective, the IDC spokesperson continued.

"A lot of the initial payout [for Fibre Channel over Ethernet] is not at the system administration level per se as it is in the deployment and installment, reducing the hassles associated with managing the facilities. I think over time as people take this structure further and they can move to a converged network system administrators will also start to leverage this to automate more functions. With a converged network you can also automate the moving of resources much more efficiently."

Without running separate NIC and HBA cards for Ethernet and Fibre Channel respectively as is the case now in the data center, there are cost savings from a cabling perspective, explains Bob Laliberte, an analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.

He noted that many large enterprises have bundles of cables in the under floor space that really take up some space. "This then restricts airflow in the data center which can affect the cooling efficiency and hence also requires more power to drive additional cooling."

In one case, a company told Laliberte that power savings stemming from reducing cabling is a major motivator for beta testing Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

"[The end user] indicated that they do not remove old cables from the bundles for fear of what might happen. As a result the amount of cabling becomes an issue. Leveraging FCoE would enable them to dramatically reduce cabling infrastructure and create a more efficient data center."

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is really extending the reach of Fibre Channel SAN beyond the data base tier towards application tiers and web tiers, stated Bob Wheeler, a senior analyst at the Linley Group.

It also helps in the consolidation of separate network attached storage and direct attached storage in the data centre.

"I think it is positive in terms of storage consolidation, and it is moving slowly and surely towards an all Ethernet infrastructure. So over time, Ethernet can be more of the connectivity and Fibre Channel becomes the last connection into the storage arrays. Eventually Fibre Channel could be replaced altogether, but that is sort of an evolutionary thing."