Avago Technologies/Broadcom Assigned Patent

Avago Technologies International Sales Pte. Ltd., Singapore, Singapore, acquired by Broadcom, has been assigned a patent (11552906) developed by Willeke, Jesse, Broomfield, CO, Shirol, Kiran Sangappa, San Jose, CA, and Konchada, Chandra Mohan, San Ramon, CA, for “hard zoning of virtual local area networks in a fibre channel fabric.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A network where FC and Ethernet storage traffic share the underlying network. The network extends FC SAN storage specific attributes to Ethernet storage devices. The network is preferably formed of FC switches, so each edge switch acts as an FCoE FCF, with internal communications done using FC. IP packets are encapsulated in FC packets for transport. Preferably, either each outward facing switch port can be configured as an Ethernet or FC port, so devices can be connected as desired. FCoE devices connected to the network are in particular virtual LANs (VLANs). The server database is extended to include VLAN information for the device and the zoning database has automatic FCOE_VLAN zones added to provide a mechanism for enhanced soft and hard zoning. Zoning is performed with the conventional zoning restrictions enhanced by including the factor that any FCoE devices must be in the same VLAN.”

The patent application was filed on 2019-06-24 (16/449449).