FCoE Now an Official Standard
This past month, the FC-BB-5 working group of the T11 Technical Committee completed its work on the FCoE standard and approved the final standard. This vote stems back to November when a letter ballot for approval resulted in more than two-thirds votes in favor of the standard. Four members, however, had cast opposing votes. The committee continued work on the standard, addressing comments from both dissenting and affirmative ballots. As a result, during its plenary meeting on June 4, the T11 unanimously approved to forward the standard to INCITS for further processing and public review with no dissenting votes.
The goal of FCoE is to enable LAN and SAN data convergence in data centers and simplify the network by bringing multiple technologies under the umbrella of a unified interface. Instead of separating over their differences or overriding the concerns of a minority of members, the drafting committee has worked towards a resolution that addresses the issues of all members concerned. The solidarity of the standard’s approval is a welcome portent of the success of FCoE.
After completing their work on converging LAN and SAN has been done, T11 is now focusing on IPC traffic for cluster computing. During the week of T11 June meeting, a new protocol proposal, RDMA over FCoE, was presented for discussion. The goal of this new protocol is to maintain high data transmission performance by taking advantage of low overhead structure of Fibre Channel. In the meantime, IO convergence is to be achieved by FCoE protocol. If this is successful, we may finally see the end of InfiniBand.
Certainly there is much work left to be done to finalize FCoE as a robust standard capable of enabling true network convergence. However, with this announcement, another milestone has been passed on the road to FCoE, and we are another step closer to achieving true network convergence in data centers.