Brocade Enters FCoE
Recently Brocade briefed Storage Switzerland on its new FCoE Products. Brocade's "We're ready when you’re ready" FCoE Strategy seems pretty straight forward. They will provide FCoE connectivity when you are ready to move that direction and if you want to stay with traditional Fibre Channel they are going to support that path as well. This approach seems logical and in sync with today's economic climate.
The goal of FCoE is to drive out cost through great consolidation and improved efficiency as well as to speed business agility through faster deployments. The challenge is even if the economy was booming you probably wouldn't rip out your current infrastructure for FCoE, what makes more sense is a gradual transition to FCoE.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
An obvious time to switch to FCoE is during a new data center build out or as you start or plan a major server virtualization build out. The challenge is that these don't come up every day. The Brocade strategy allows for either a quick migration, a gradual transition or even just sticking with standard Fibre.
The Brocade 8000 Series FCoE Switches deliver a high performance non-blocking switching architecture. Each switch has 24 x 10Gb FCoE ports and 8 x 8Gb FC ports connecting via SFP+ or Twinax. The 8Gb FC ports are a must have since no storage manufacturers are yet shipping FCoE. In a highly available environment this is an ideal configuration allowing for 20 or so servers to connect into dual 8000's and attaching up to 8 redundant Fibre Channel ports for storage connectivity.
Briefing Report
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Let's assume 20 servers configured to be virtual hosts, each would likely have dual quad port 1GbE cards for network connectivity and dual Fibre Channel SAN connections. That would be 4 cards per server or 80 cards total and 10 cable connections to each server for 200 total cable connections.
Compare this to an FCoE environment. Each server would only need two cards for redundancy and two cables for a total of 40 cards and 40 cable connections. Each connection would be at 10Gbps, improving overall performance for both IP and FC. This performance improvement comes while delivering a 50% reduction in cards and reducing the cable count by 160 cables. This cable reduction happens where data centers need it most and where space is at the highest premium, the racks.
The switch can then be placed top of a rack with the remaining Ethernet connections going to core network infrastructure and the Fibre connections connecting to storage.
To make the FCoE connection complete each of these servers will need a converged network adaptor (CNA). Brocade's entry into that space is their 1010/1020 (single port / dual port). It features about 500,000 IOPs per port, excellent power dissipation at 10.5W and is the industry's first single ASIC 10Gbps FCoE CNA.
In virtualization environments this combination of Brocade switches and Brocade CNAs potentially deliver ideal support with 64 I/O queues per port for flexible allocation of host resources. As we described in our articles on NPIV and QoS, these are critical capabilities for broadening server virtualization rollouts to handle even the most performance sensitive virtual machines.
Brocade entry into FCoE does not come at the expense of Fibre. They continue to remain committed to 8Gbps Fibre Channel and its eventual upgrade to 16Gbps. Most importantly you upgrade when you are ready, a server at a time, a virtualization project at a time or a new data center at a time, or not at all. The choice is as it should be, yours.
