FCIA Showcased Enterprise Fabric for Transporting NVMe Natively

Demonstrating the innovation of the FC standard and reinforcing its status as a reliable and robust storage networking protocol, the Fibre Channel Industry Association http://www.fibrechannel.org (FCIA) announced the completion of the first Plugfest to ensure both interoperability and configurability of Gen 6 32Gb FC products.

Generation of FC
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The event also featured the industry’s first proof-of-concept of NVMe over Fabrics using datacenter-proven FC technology.

The Plugfest was held during the week of June 20th, 2016 at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL) with 11 companies participating (see below).

“The FCIA and UNH-IOL have conducted more than 36 Plugfests over 18 years to test the continued development of FC technologies,” said Mark Jones, president and COB, FCIA, and director, technical marketing and performance, Broadcom Limited. “The successful conclusion of this event provides assurance to the FC SAN community that the latest FC Gen 6 specification meets the needs of flash storage technologies. The event was also notable as providing the first multi-vendor proof-of-concept testing for FC over the new NVMe over Fabrics storage interface standard, highlighting the adaptive architecture of FC that has more than 50 million installed ports in operation in the world’s leading datacenters.”

Key test accomplishments from the Plugfest include:

Gen6 FC:

Physical conformance to FC Physical Interface-6 (FC-PI-6)
Gen6 32GFC, 16GFC and 8GFC interoperability and backwards compatibility
Multi-topology use case conformance; including 10km ISLs and direct connect
Multi-vendor N_Port Virtualization (NPV) and N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) interoperability
Large multi-vendor and HA redundant fabric conformance
Improved data protection and security
Gen6 – 32GFC and 16GFC forward error correction (FEC) interoperability
T10 Protection Information
FC port-security, also referred to as port binding
Low-cost high-reliability 32/16/8G FC active-optical-cable (AOC) and DAC interoperability

FC-NVMe – first industry-wide multi-vendor proof of concept:

FC Fabric connectivity to a variety of market available NVMe PCIe-based drives
Multiple vendor FC-NVMe initiator and target interface operations
I/O validation over direct-connect and switched fabric topologies
Concurrent NVMe and legacy SCSI traffic
Backwards compatibility with previous FC speeds, fiber optics, and fiber cables
Packet inspection using updated industry tools

FCoE over 25GbE and Gen 6 converged fabric interoperability
and backwards compatibility:

25GbE FCoE server to converged Gen 6 FC and FCoE core and storage
Multi-topology use-case conformance

The 11 participating companies were:

Amphenol Corporation
Broadcom Limited
Brocade Communication Systems
Data Center Systems (DCS)
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd
Molex Inc.
QLogic Corporation
SANBlaze Technology, Inc.
Teledyne LeCroy, Inc.
Viavi Solutions Inc.

“FCIA-sponsored Plugfests continue to allow participants to validate interoperability of FC products including backward compatibility of FC products at 8GFC and 16GCF to new Gen6 32 GFC and 128 GFC products,” said Barry Maskas, FC Plugfest chair and technical staff senior member at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “With continued innovation such as the FC-NVMe configurations tested at this Plugfest, we can see that the methodology for interoperability and compatibility that has been proven successful by the participating FC companies, allows customers to grow their storage infrastructure and take advantage of speed and functional improvements while leveraging current investments.”

“We are pleased to see the rapid adoption of the NVMe over Fabrics specification,” said Amber Huffman, president of NVM Express, Inc. “The FC Plugfest shows interoperability across NVMe over Fabrics targets and initiators giving confidence for the FC-NVME standard to be finalized and products delivered.”