From Juniper to Cisco to VMware, companies are spouting up new SDN solutions. Juniper’s Contrail, Cisco’s ACI, VMware’s NSX, and more are all vying to be the next generation of data center networking. What is surprising, however, is what’s at the heart of these new technologies.
Is it VXLAN, NVGRE, Openflow? Nope. It’s Fibre Channel.
Seriously.
If you think about it, it makes sense. Fibre Channel has been doing fabrics since before we ever called Ethernet fabrics, well, fabrics. And this isn’t the first time that Fibre Channel has shown up in unusual places. There’s a version of Fibre Channel that runs inside certain airplanes, including jet fighters like the F-22.
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Keep the skies safe from FCoE (sponsored by the Evaluator Group)
New generation of switches have been capable of Data Center Bridging (DCB), which enables Fibre Channel over Ethernet. These chips are also capable of doing native Fibre Channel So rather than build complicated VPLS fabrics or routed networks, various data center switching companies are leveraging the inherent Fibre Channel capabilities of the merchant silicon and building Fibre Channel-based underlay networks to support an IP-based overlay.
Buffer-to-buffer (B2B) credit system and losslessness of Fibre Channel, plus the new 32/128 Gigabit interfaces with the newest Fibre Channel standard are all being leveraged for these underlays. I find it surprising that so many companies are adopting this, you’d think it’d be just Brocade. But Cisco, Arista (who notoriously shunned FCoE) and Juniper are all on board with new or announced SDN offerings that are based mostly or in part on Fibre Channel.
However, most of the switches from various vendors are primarily Ethernet today, so the 10/40 Gigabit interfaces can run FCoE until more switches are available with native FC interfaces. Of course, these switches will still be required to have a number of native Ethernet ports in order to connect to border networks that aren’t part of the overlay network, so there will be still a need for Ethernet. But it seems the market has spoken, and they want Fibre Channel.
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