Before I came to Cisco I still wrote about Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and did my best to try to help edumificate people on how the technology works. One of the most popular things I’ve ever written, in fact, was a comparison between FCoE and another convergence technology, iSCSI. Since that time I’ve come to learn and understand a lot more about both technologies, how they relate to each other, and how storage networks are designed and implemented using them.

Since Demartek published the recent piece on multiprotocol connectivity, which included some comparisons on the protocols regarding latency I thought it might be a good time to revisit some of those questions.  Read More »

Tags: FCoE, Fibre Channel, iSCSI

There are a lot of questions that people ask regarding Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), especially Multihop FCoE, and what happens when you put it into place inside the Data Center. For the most part, the questions have involved two particular threads: architecture and performance:

• What are my options with FCoE?
• Where can FCoE fit into my Data Center?
• Is there a performance penalty for running FCoE?
• How do Fibre Channel, FCoE, and iSCSI compare?

Demartek, a third-party research and analysis corporation, recently published an evaluation on Cisco’s Multiprotocol Connectivity and Multi-Topology solutions, which found that not only were the topology configurations extremely flexible for many different types of environments, but also found that even with multiple switches, multihop FCoE topologies can provide excellent performance within the Data Center.

Dennis Martin, founder and President of Demartek, will be presenting these findings and discussing his impressions of the technology in a live, public webinar, Thursday, August 9, at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT. We encourage you to attend to learn more about how these different technologies can fit inside the data center.

Tags: FCoE, Fibre Channel, iSCSI

As the Product Manager for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), I often get asked some of the hard questions about how the technology works. Sometimes I get asked the easy questions. Sometimes -- like two nights ago -- I get asked if the standards for FCoE are done.

I’m not kidding.

My own expectations for discussing FCoE were focused around the topics and conversations that we’ve been seeing over the last year, since the last Cisco Live in 2011. Read More »

Tags: ciscolive, data center, FCoE, Multihop FCoE

I’m here at Cisco Live 2012 in San Diego, and coming off of a high of being able to talk to about 60 CCIE networking rock stars about the next generation Data Center.

In case you aren’t familiar, a Techtorial is an 8-hour continuous spray from the firehose (yes, 8 hours!), on top of the normal Cisco Live fare, that goes into the ultra deep technical weeds. These guys are the ones who are planning, designing, and implementing the data centers that we at Cisco only talk about. Truly stellar group of people who know what they’re talking about.

Our session (I was one of 5 speakers during the day) was a non-stop barrage of some of the most technical networking material you can imagine. We covered everything from Hadoop to VPCs to FabricPath to QoS to VM-FEX, and of course storage.

More and more often, questions from the networking teams are looking at storage requirements as they are planning to accommodate consolidated IO. Not just FCoE, but also iSCSI, NAS, and even Hadoop environments, and they need to know what could come and bite them when they weren’t looking.

When I asked how many of them were already having conversations with the storage teams about converging the networks, about 90% of them raised their hands. As a result, we got into the nitties and the gritties about ingress and egress buffering, COS Virtual Lanes, and QoS bandwidth allocations. Like I said, deep stuff.

As I’ve said before, in my world I have a rather skewed perspective. Since I live, eat, breathe, drink storage -- particularly FCoE -- I see the adoption at all levels in the data center.

And now you can too. I’m going to be giving specific examples of customer deployments at the Expo World of Solutions in Intel’s booth today (Monday, June 11) at 5 p.m., and again in NetApp’s booth on Wednesday, June 13, at 3:00 p.m.

Of course, you can come here it straight from the customer’s mouth, at “Voice of the Customer: FCoE”, where Bart Falzarano, Chief Information Security Officer from Walz Group, will be talking about how his company has deployed FCoE with great success. That session is WoS5030, at the Cisco Main Theatre on Tuesday, June 12 at 12:15 p.m.

These sessions are short -- only 10-15 minutes, so it may not be a good idea to dawdle.

Tags: Customer Deployment, FCoE, QoS, Storage Networking

Here we are in an age of automation, consolidation, virtualization, optimization and the proliferation of a dozen other terms and technologies that are enabling IT organizations and users to do more with less and from just about any location.  We’re building clouds and service catalogs, virtual desktops and creating IT service providers.   The skills required by IT organizations continue to grow in leaps and bounds.  No more can you just be “the router engineer” or “the backup engineer”, you’re faced with learning other technologies.  Not so much learning, but cross training.  Read More »

Tags: data center, employee development, FCoE, information