It’s been a long time coming, it’s true. It was long the #1 request I have gotten when it comes to Cisco’s deployment for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE): when is UCS going to have “FCoE Northbound?”

Now, at long last, I can confirm that the answer is right now.

I saw the announcement over the weekend, and before I had a chance to even sneeze out a tweet of my own, I was beat to the punch by a few other intrepid UCS fiends. The reaction was one of unadulterated joy and pure, rapturous bliss.

Or something close to that.

In all seriousness, from a storage perspective the one thing that has driven people crazy is the fact that the UCS Fabric Interconnects (FIs) could not continue with convergence upstream. It’s been the #1 question I’ve gotten as a storage Product Manager, and while I’ve long said that FCoE is not the panacea for the Data Center, I believe this goes a long way in making converged network even more realistic in today’s environments. Read More »

Tags: Multihop FCoE, Nexus 5000, Nexus 7000, UCS

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

My buddy Steve Foskett wrote a blog recently that talks about FCoE and 16Gb Fibre Channel. I want to say, for the record, that I like Steven, a lot, and normally I think he has a good grasp of the realities of new SAN technologies that emerge.

At the very least he has usually shown himself to be fair and balanced, even if not totally unbiased. In the many, many articles he has written I have never seen him knowingly write something to be untrue in his examination of technologies such as FCoE… until now.

For that reason, I can’t help but feel very disappointed. Read More »

Tags: converged networks, FCoE, Multihop FCoE

For months people have been asking me what I’m doing, and it’s been difficult to hold something like this under my hat because I’ve been really excited about this.

How the time has flown. I joined Cisco in June of last year, and on my first day my manager told me that I was going to be working on a new product -- an FCoE blade for the MDS 9500 Series Fibre Channel Directors. Read More »

Tags: FCoE, MDS, Multihop FCoE, Nexus 2000, Nexus 5000, Nexus 7000