NetApp Expands Options for FCoE and DCB Customers

NetApp, Inc. has expanded its Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Data Center Bridging (DCB) product offerings with help from solution partners Brocade, Emulex, and VMware. NetApp customers now have more options to build complete end-to-end FCoE infrastructures and unify their Ethernet and Fibre Channel architectures.

NetApp continues to advance the technology by expanding its product portfolio with support from its solution partners. As part of this expansion, NetApp will begin reselling a new Converged Network Adapter (CNA) from Emulex, and is among the first storage vendors to support VMware vSphere 4 in an FCoE host environment. NetApp has also augmented its FCoE portfolio from Brocade. In addition to offering Brocade’s CNAs, FCoE blade for the DCX, and the top-of-rack 8000 FCoE switch, NetApp is now introducing a DCB-only version of the Brocade 8000.

"In our recent testing, the NetApp storage system did a wonderful job handling FCoE, iSCSI, and other storage protocols simultaneously in a single solution and is a very compelling proposition for customers looking to consolidate their data centers or move to FCoE," said Dennis Martin, president of Demartek, a provider of lab validation reports and vendor-neutral product comparison research reports for software and computer infrastructure products. "Being first to market and having a robust partner ecosystem that provides their customers with a host of options to build end-to-end solutions makes NetApp a true leader in the 10 Gigabit Ethernet and FCoE space."

"Emulex is proud to partner with a leader in the Ethernet space to help bring the best possible Ethernet-driven network convergence solutions to our joint customers," said Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of business development at Emulex. "Emulex brings a powerful network convergence connectivity architecture to NetApp’s end-to-end FCoE infrastructure with its OneConnect Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs), and together we help our customers maximize cost and hardware efficiencies in their data centers without compromising performance."

With NetApp and its solutions partners, customers can build end-to-end FCoE infrastructures while still supporting existing Fibre Channel investments and take a phased approach to consolidating their data centers around Ethernet. By using Emulex OneConnect UCNAs, customers can run both FCoE and IP traffic through the same port and on the same wire, eliminating the need for and expense of separate SAN and LAN adapters and cables. Emulex OneConnect UCNAs provide maximum performance, regardless of the mix of network traffic, and outperformed other vendors’ CNAs in recent testing by IT Brand Pulse. Now customers can build out their Ethernet infrastructure over time while maintaining maximum performance and protecting previous infrastructure investments.

"NetApp’s philosophy and strength has always been to offer a unified, multiprotocol storage portfolio that gives customers the benefit of both efficiency and performance," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. "By working closely with our solutions partners like Brocade, Emulex, and VMware to push the envelope of what’s possible with Ethernet storage, we’re able to offer customers more options than ever before to help them simplify and unify their infrastructure and achieve business breakthroughs."

The foundation technology of FCoE is 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE). As a pioneer and leader in 10GbE Storage, NetApp has shipped nearly 14,000 10GbE ports since first offering them in 2006 and, as the technology bloomed, has seen an 85% increase over the last seven months. As customers look to consolidate data center resources, they can increase value and efficiency by sharing the bandwidth of a high-performance 10GbE network infrastructure. The increased bandwidth and added enhancements to support FCoE make 10GbE the ideal interconnect for modern data centers.

To read the Demartek evaluation of NetApp unified Ethernet storage