FCoE Standard Adopted

The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) announced that the
T11 Technical Committee adopted a common addressing structure for the
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard.

FCoE enables SAN traffic
to be natively transported over Ethernet networks, while protecting and
extending the investment that customers have made in Fibre Channel
storage networks. A A common addressing structure allows products to be
built by the industry to a single standard.

This new feature is
supported by the following Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA)
members: Amphenol Corporation, Broadcom, Brocade, Cisco
Systems, Corning Cable Systems, EMC, Emulex Corporation, Finisar
Corporation, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel
Corporation, LSI, Mellanox Technologies, NetApp, Nuova Systems,
PMC-Sierra, QLogic Corporation and TrueFocus, Inc.

“The timely
adoption of this latest proposal demonstrates the continuing
cooperation among Fibre Channel companies”, says Chris Lyon Executive
Director of the FCIA. "FCoE promises to provide data center managers
with a converged network, combining both Fibre Channel and Ethernet
fabrics, which will simplify management and provide greater
efficiencies.”

FCoE offers a new
choice for consolidated server IO connectivity in the data center. This
will result in a greater quantity of servers having access to Fibre
Channel Storage Area Networks than today. FCoE complements today’s
existing connectivity and protocols used in storage and data center
networking. User benefits of this technology include:

• Seamless extension and protection of existing storage investments
• Lower, long-term operating costs via consolidated connectivity and management
• A management model consistent with that used in Fibre Channel SANs
• A unified data center fabric that meets the reliability,
  latency, and performance requirements for storage and broader data
  center connectivity
• Additional server connectivity options for more cost-effective data center networking
• Reduction in multiple server I/O and parallel network infrastructure commonly used in data centers

Fibre Channel
Industry Association (FCIA)