[c-nsp] Nexus 5K FCoE to FC breakout

[Justin C Darby]

Unfortunately, no. Outside of multiple vendors promising it's coming soon,
it's been smoke and mirrors. I think the major players up front are going
to be EMC and NetApp, with NetApp in theory having devices on the market
right now I haven't seen yet.
( http://www.netapp.com/us/products/protocols/fcoe/ )

We're actually using in-house built ATA-over-Ethernet devices which have
similar advantages, but this isn't very 'enterprisey' - this was us trying
to find a way to deal with extreme I/O loads on giant Oracle databases
(which are now back to being CPU bound for the first time in years). They
also beat the heck out of 4x FC interfaces, preforming at 600-800MB/s, for
most of our applications under load. There are a bunch of people jumping
all over this, but I haven't seen results quite yet, I'm just expecting to
see them this year.

The existence of HBA's means its coming - Cisco's UCS design actually
counts on having FCoE 10GbE HBA's if what I'm reading about them is
correct.

Justin

-----David Hughes  wrote: -----
To: Justin C Darby <jcdarby at usgs.gov>
From: David Hughes <David at hughes.com.au>
Date: 04/16/2009 05:40AM
cc: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Nexus 5K FCoE to FC breakout

 Hi Justin,  On 16/04/2009, at 10:21 AM, Justin C Darby wrote:  > Unless
 you are using legacy FC devices, hold off on the 5K for this.   > The >
 reason I say this is because a new class of storage devices and   > HBA's
 that > use 10GbE native are hitting the market. Some vendors are mostly
 > there, > others not at all.  I haven't seen much activity on the native
 FCoE storage front yet.    Hanging storage directly off a N7K (when there
 are FCoE linecards for   it) is the perfect solution but that's a way off.
 There isn't even   multi-hop support for FCoE yet so doing a "real" FCoE
 end-to-end   solution is not going to happen too soon.  It all sounds very
 cool but   I think the paint is still quite wet on this stuff.  FCoE to FC
 break-  out looks like a reasonable intermediary step.  Do you have
 details on native FCoE storage offerings?    Thanks  David ...