FCoE: Facts and Questions

Today, I had the pleasure of participating on Wikibon’s FCoE: Fact vs. Fiction call.  In case you weren’t sure of the power of social media – even for a niche discussion of FCoE, a bunch of bloggers promoting the event had the call beyond the 200 line capacity of the system.  If you weren’t able to be part of the call, the audio is now available (click the play button below).

A number of posts are being created on the Wikibon site to summarize the actions that should be taken based on the discussion.  It’s a collaborative effort, I did the vendor actions post:

On February 2nd’s FCoE Fact vs. Fiction call call, we discussed that one of the key benefits of FCoE is that there is a robust vendor ecosystem including server, operating system, network and storage vendors. The creation of the technology includes new standards in both storage (T11) and networking (IEEE and IETF). There was some concern from practitioners that FCoE could be plagued with some of the interoperability challenges that have historically been found in the FC market.

As vendors are looking to move customers along the adoption curve of FCoE, they would do well to consider both the historical challenges of the industry as well as the long term goal of flexibility that customers are pursuing.

Action Item: Vendors that are serious about FCoE will do more than just give lip service to the development of solutions. They should actively engage in the creation of standards that will allow for vendor interoperability. They will also create robust documentation including reference architectures.

Footnotes: See EMC’s FCoE Techbook (http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/technical-documentation/h6290-fibre-channel-over-ethernet-techbook.pdf) and Emulex’s Convergenomics: The Converged Network Solutions Guide (http://www.emulex.com/solutions/convergenomics/convergenomics-guide.html)

Disclaimer: I work for EMC and Emulex was involved in organizing the Peer Incite Review Call on FCoE.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions on FCoE or topics that you think would be good for a blog post or video.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

FCoE in 2010 – update and events

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is still a hot topic in 2010.  My expectation is that in 2010, FCoE will have strong growth (of course, growing by high percentages is easy when you start with small numbers) and that as more server options with FCoE become available that we will start to see FCoE expanding many FC environments. From a standards perspective, T11 FC-BB-6 is working to “add details” to the current FCoE environments; while the exact goals are not completed, they may include distributed FCF functionality (enabling multi-hop) and direct connectivity of end nodes (removing the requirement of a switch).  People should understand that even when we have multi-hop and end-to-end configurations, that it will take time to grow the scope of solutions.  In 2010, we are unlikely to see an all-Ethernet FCoE configuration running thousands of nodes in a single configuration.

As part of the extending the solution to you, there are some upcoming events where I will be speaking on FCoE.

FCoE: Fact vs Fiction hosted by Wikibon

The first event will be a conversation hosted by Wikibon.  I will be joining Nigel Poulton, Dave Graham,  and others to discuss the realities of the technology, share what we are hearing in the marketplace and answer your questions.

Please join us and participate in the conversation.

Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm ET (9:00am – 10:00am PT)

See the Wikibon site for more details on the call.

Ethernet Summit

The Ethernet Summit is a 2-day event put on by the Ethernet Alliance, this year’s is February 24-25, 2010 at the Wyndham Hotel in San Jose, CA.

There will be a full day of FCoE where I will be presenting the origins and status of FCoE.  The keynote of the day is Silvano Gai, who literally wrote the book on FCoE.  Claudio DeSanti, Chairperson of the committee at T11 that defines FCoE, will be giving the technology overview and there will be a panel discussion including members from Emulex, HP, QLogic, NetApp and Cisco.

In addition to the FCoE coverage, I’ll be looking forward to getting the latest on the networking industry including plenty of information on 40/100 Gb Ethernet.

For more details on the conference including the full agenda and registration details, see http://www.ethernetsummit.com/.

EMC World 2010

If you see my posts from last year, EMC World has always been one of my favorite weeks of the year.  The conference is May 10-13th in Boston.  My presentation last year was the top attended for the entire conference, so the bar is set high for this year.  My presentation for this year is entitled Converged Data Center: FCoE, iSCSI and the future of storage networking.  It’s always a great sharing of information with so many people that I look forward to seeing.  For more details and for registration (there are some great gifts available if you register by February 28th), please click the graphic below.

Please post any questions that you have and let me know if you’ll be at any of the events listed.  If you are new to this site and interested in continuing the discussion on storage networking, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

Journey to the Virtualized Data Center: Virtualization and Networking Considerations

On December 15th and 16th, Cisco will be hosting a virtual trade show to highlight the Journey to the Virtualized Data Center.  Cisco has brought together 11 partners to share with you the best ways to solve the toughest data center challenges in networking, storage, applications, and physical infrastructure technologies.

Chris Carrier, Director of Marketing for EMC’s virtualization practice and I will be doing a Live Chat (Tuesday, December 15th, 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific) from the EMC booth in the virtual trade show.  In addition to the top ten considerations for virtualization from Chris and the top ten considerations for networking from me, we look forward to answering your questions.

It’s been a busy year in both the networking and virtualization spaces; as we wrap up 2009, we hope you’ll take the opportunity to join us for this discussion.

For more on the conference, see Cisco’s Data Center Networks blog and register at the DCoF site.

If you are interested in continuing the discussion on storage networking, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

FCoE Ecosystem

Here is the 3rd video in a series to help educate on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE):

For a full list of EMC FCoE resources, see my previous post The current state of FCoE.

Additionally, on the question of “end-to-end Ethernet”, see the discussion on Scott Lowe’s Why No Multi-Hop FCoE? blog post.

Both Cisco and Brocade have made announcements about new products for expanding the FCoE ecosystem.  Cisco’s Nexus 4000 provides the blade switch functionality that I discuss in the video.  They also have a whitepaper on FIP (FCoE initialization protocol) and FIP snooping which is part of what is needed for a multi-hop environment.  Brocade announced an FCoE blade for the DCX FC director product line.

Let me know if there are any related topics that you would like to see covered.

Comments are questions are always welcome and please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

The current state of FCoE

Nigel Poulton has been posting some good articles about FCoE on http://blogs.rupturedmonkey.com/. It’s good to see a good discussion taking place, many people still don’t understand the basics, so it’s good to repeat and if you look at the details hopefully people will understand that FCoE shows great promise, with the caveat that we are still very early in the maturation of the technology.

A brief update on FCoE related standards

T11 FC-BB-5 has been ratified by T11 (so it is “done” although it still goes through some processing which is typically a “rubber stamp).

T11 FC-BB-6 is starting up and while the charter and timeline are not finalized, it will be discussing how to create larger FCoE configurations (allowing for creation of a “CEE Cloud”).

IEEE Data Center Bridging: the link level components (Priority Flow Control, Enhanced Transmission Selection and Data Center Bridging Exchange Protocol) are defined and should be ratified soon.  Congestion Notification is a 2010 target.  Layer 2 multipathing will be handled by the IETF TRILL standard which is defined, but not yet in products.

For more on the standards, see the presentations and papers below.

Product configuration today

EMC is supporting FCoE switches from Cisco and Brocade; Converged Network Adapters (CNA) from Emulex, QLogic and Brocade; OSes supported are Windows, Linux and VMware [as always, see the E-Lab Navigator for the latest]

Today, the configuration is from a CNA to FCoE switch (must have a switch, no support according to FC-BB-5 for server to storage w/o a switch; if you need this, use iSCSI) and from the switch you can then plug into the existing LAN and SAN.  Storage can either be plugged into the configuration via the SAN (through existing FC switches) or directly into the FCoE switch (today via FC or via FCoE when available).  Note that configurations of having FCoE traffic go through multiple FCoE (Ethernet) switches will require the updates which are being worked on in FC-BB-6 (although a small expansion of configurations specifically with blade servers should be able to be supported soon).  FCoE today is a consolidation at the server and access layer – full end-to-end solutions with larger aggregation will take time.

I have worked on a lot of FCoE collateral over the last year and thought it would be useful to create a list for reference:

YouTube

Intro to FCoE w/ EMC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZWaOda8mVY – basic 101 of the technology

Deploying FCoE w/ EMC  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6IHMXEGRXs – the new equipment that you’ll need including cables, adapters and switches

FCoE Ecosystem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExxilbDvZ1g – see FCoE Ecosystem post for more details

FCoE discussions w/ Kash Sheik of Cisco on the Storage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTz9S0cSdNo) and Network (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1mI-eB8-iE) implications of fcoe

Presentations

My EMC World 2009 presentation: Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI and the Converged Data Center – http://www.slideshare.net/stuminiman/fibre-channel-over-ethernet-fcoe-iscsi-and-the-converged-data-center

Innovation Network Lecture – Journey Towards the Converged Data Center (archived webinar) https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-4398

Papers

Introduction to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h5916-intro-to-fcoe-wp.pdf (Updated Nov ‘09)

Fibre Channel over Ethernet Techbook [from EMC E-Lab] http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/technical-documentation/h6290-fibre-channel-over-ethernet-techbook.pdf

Dilbert ∩ Convergence

I guess the topic of convergence is getting a lot of hype if even Dilbert is talking about it:

Sounds like they could use a private cloud solution.

Not only didn’t I need to make any edits to the strip to make it very relevant, but thanks to the wonders of the web, it is so easy to share or embed this without having to worry about copyright infringement.

∩ is the symbol for intersection.  As I always suspected, the intersection of innovation, social media, storage and virtualization is Dilbert.  Now I just need a good Venn diagram for the header for this blog – anyone with graphic talents want to help me make one?

Two Looks at Convergence with FCoE Webcasts

There has been a lot of activity with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) over the last couple of months.  In June, the T11 FC-BB-5 group ratified the standard.  Cisco has started shipping their Unified Computing System (UCS) which integrates FCoE – see EMC’s full support statement and a whitepaper showing UCS support with VMware and EMC Storage.

In examining FCoE, the technology maturation and cultural impacts of converged networking must be considered.  There are two upcoming webcasts that will examine these issues.

First, Dave Vellante of Wikibon will be hosting The Business Impact of Converged IT.

DATE: Tuesday, August 11, 2009; TIME: 12:00-1:00 pm PT / 3:00-4:00 pm ET

Free registration at http://info.emc.com/mk/get/AMA00017798_LP?reg_src=IN

It will be a discussion with customers looking at both the storage and networking groups and how convergence will affect their operations.  One of the great things about FCoE is that for customers that have Fibre Channel (FC) today, their current applications and storage management practices can continue unchanged; as shown in the diagram below, above the adapter and in the SAN, the packets are still FC.

In the second webcast, I will be presenting The Journey Towards the Converged Data Center: Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI.

DATE: Wednesday, September 2, 2009; TIME: 11:00 am-12:00 pm PT / 2:00-3:00 pm ET

Free registration at http://info.emc.com/mk/get/18233_raf_lp

It is the September installment of the EMC Innovation Lecture Series, you can find links for upcoming and archived presentations on the EMC Community Network site.  I will discuss the history of technologies that have attempted to provide a single network for all traffic, how we are now developing solutions that will allow us to reach this ultimate goal and how we expect the solutions to mature over time.  As noted futurist Paul Saffo has stated, change never happens linearly, it happens as an S-curve where we overestimate how fast change will start and underestimate how fast it will take off once it gets going.

For more FCoE information including videos and presentations, please see my old blog site http://nohype.tumblr.com/tagged/fcoe

If you are interested in continuing the discussion on FCoE, please consider subscribing to this blog.