Cisco Nexus is considered as the most revolutionary product from the house of Cisco. In Cisco Nexus series lets talk about its another feature today i.e. FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet). This technology is not new for us it has been around for almost two and half year now, but FCoE when combined with other Nexus features brings a true revolution to your datacenter network.
Alrite... First of All whats FCoE ?
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a mapping of Fibre Channel over selected full duplex IEEE 802.3 networks. The goal is to provide I/O consolidation over Ethernet, reducing network complexity in the Datacenter. This basically reduces the number number of cables and I/O ports (and lot of money on Fibre Infra).
 |
| Image Courtesy - Wikipedia X59RQ5S8RQ9B |
Diagram above shows use 10G Ethernet instead of traditional fibre. This had alwyas been a problem with SAN that you needed to build a parallel fibre network to have high throughput and loseless network.
When combined with other Nexus features like OTV & FabricPath
It can surprise you with the results. OTV allows you to create separate VDC or virtual devices, enabling you to create different zones for storage and server network & FabricPath eliminates the requirement of STP (rather it provides better results than STP) allowing you to use all the links simultaemously without tedious configurations.
isn't it awesome ?? YES it is...
Lets talk about few benefits of FCoE (with Nexus) -
• Reduction in the number of adapters and network infrastructure devices
• Reduction in the number of cables
–– Allows economical blend of inexpensive copper and longer-link optical technologies
–– Reduces cable installation expenses
–– Significantly reduces the number of long cables
–– Can increase server density if server deployment is impeded by cable bulk or
airflow concerns
–– Reduces the possibility of air dams in the data center
–– Reduces cable maintenance and provisioning concerns in the data center
• Reduction in the amount of power used
• Reduction in space used due to switch equipment rack occupancy
• Reduction is server height due to fewer add-in card slot requirements if servers are
I/O bound
• Redeployment of power and space savings to provisioning of additional servers, extending the life of the data center
Okie, I had managed to find an animated video to explain benefits of FCoE -
Alrite, now when you know what exactly FCoE can do for you, Lets have look at the video below and understand how Cisco can do wonders with major SAN vendors... Let the gentleman take it forward -
Okie... Just tried to cover another topic in the Nexus series... would continue with rest of the features...
For those who missed our earlier posts -
Cisco Nexus Overlay Transport Virtualization - Read This
Cisco Nexus FabricPath - Click Here
X59RQ5S8RQ9B