There has been a lot written about Fibre Channel over Ethernet
(FCoE) the last few years but FCoE was merely an initial skirmish
in the battle for the infrastructure. The major systems
manufacturers are all placing their bets on everything over
Ethernet and that is were the battle will be waged. 2011 may not be
the year that you implement a converged infrastructure but it may
be the year you decide which vendors you are going to use for
convergence.
FCoE, while it gets a lot of the hype, is really a subset of the
conversation. It is the means by which Fibre channel
infrastructures will move to Ethernet. Interestingly the core
infrastructure suppliers are less concerned about which protocol
you use than they used to be. We are seeing the same stance from
the interface card vendors as well. Companies that a few years ago
only made Fibre channel adapters are now shipping cards with no FC
support, allowing you to add FCoE later. In both cases the plan is
to make it easy for you to buy converged gear without having to
converge right away. Start building a 10GbE infrastructure for
networking, then add iSCSI and FCoE when and if you need to.
The ability to start with using converged infrastructure components
as normal Ethernet networking devices first allows you to start
building a converged infrastructure without actually doing any
convergence. One process is to not do any converging until you have
enough of these newer generation components that it makes sense to
begin converging other protocols. This becomes a more logical
migration strategy. It makes the move to convergence a slower
process but may reduce some of the fear surrounding a more
aggressive rip and replace strategy. The overall effect could be a
wider acceptance of convergence.
The key for successful convergence on Ethernet is going to be
fixing the limitations of the standard IP network and make it more
data center ready. This means we are going to need to address the
limitations of IP and Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). As we discussed
in our recent article "Network Limitations To Cloud Computing and
Convergence" data centers are becoming larger and server
virtualization more widespread and we need to move to a more data
center grade version of Ethernet, that is lossless and has a
non-blocking architecture. The foundation for this will be based on
TRILL but most of the major switch vendors will provide further
enhancements. The HBA vendors will also be working to address
limitations of Ethernet by offloading protocol processing and
providing better virtual machine handling.
Convergence will happen, and there is every indication that it will
be Ethernet based. The vendors are making it easy to get started by
allowing you to buy products that can support multiple Ethernet
protocols as you grow and upgrade your current Ethernet
environment. The action plan for you now is to understand which
infrastructure and card vendor is the best for your environment.