Fibre Channel over Ethernet
NAS Recovery - Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a proposed standard designed to enable Fibre Channel communications over 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks. FCoE protocol specification replaces the FC0 and FC1 layers of the Fibre Channel stack with Ethernet. With its native Fibre Channel architecture, FCoE seamlessly integrates with existing Fibre Channel networks and management software.
FCoE is supported by a large number of network and storage vendors including Broadcom, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Hitachi, Sun Microsystems and more. FcoE competes with iSCSI.
FCoE uses Ethernet frames to encapsulate, route, and transport Fibre Channel frames across an Ethernet network from one switch with Fibre Channel ports and devices attached to another similar switch.
Application
FCoE finds the best application in data center storage area networks (SANs). Many data centers use Ethernet for TCP/IP networks and Fibre Channel for storage area networks (SANs). FCoE makes the Fibre Channel run on Ethernet alongside the traditional IP traffic.
One main difference between FCoE and iSCSI is that FCoE runs above Ethernet in a network protocol stack while iSCSI runs on top of TCP and IP. Because of this iSCSI is not routable at the IP layer and will not work across routed IP networks.
FCoE is also known for their cable reduction ability. FCoE consolidates network (IP) and storage (SAN) data traffic using a single network switch and reduces the number of network interface cards, cables and switches, thereby reducing infrastructure and power costs.
Because of these reasons, FCoE finds special application in data center and server virtualization applications, which usually demand many physical I/O connections per server.
