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At the recent DCB plugfest, I served as the technical lead.  One of my responsibilities was to design and organize the test tracks, so I had an excellent and direct view of the progress which has been made over the past year.  JDSU also played a significant role at the FCoE plugfest and had similar visibility into the success of the interoperability testing there.

To avoid any possible confusion, it’s worth clarifying the difference between DCB and FCoE and why there were separate plugfests.  DCB is an infrastructure technology comprised of four primary protocols – Data Center Bridging eXchange (DCBX), Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS), Priority Flow Control (PFC), and Quantized Congestion Notification (QCN).  Testing at the DCB Plugfest focused on the unified network and the ability to run various applications such as FCoE, iSCSI over DCB, and RDMA over DCB.  For its part, the FCoE plugfest focused on verifying FCoE as alternative storage network technology and its prerequisite Ethernet enhancements such as PFC and DCBX that are included in the DCB specification.  Testing at the FCoE plugfest probed deeply into the protocol and performance was compared against native network traffic.  For example, testing included verifying the login process with FIP, maintaining virtual links, and measuring read/write/mixed I/O performance for real storage applications.

Through both plugfests, the overall mechanisms as well as deep implementation issues of DCB were thoroughly tested.  Equipment from different manufacturers was connected to verify interoperability and compliance to the standards.  JDSU has long been a primary supporter of DCB and FCoE and stood at the center of bringing the interoperability process together, both by participating in the test definition process as well as by supplying the monitoring and analysis tools required to verify performance.  JDSU provided participates with its industry-leading Xgig platform, comprised of Analyzer, Jammer, Load Tester, and Expert analysis functions.  With these tools, not only could manufacturers verify that devices were performing as expected by manipulating traffic and capturing results for comprehensive analysis, they could immediately identify and troubleshoot the source of any interoperability issues that arose.

Both plugfests were highly successful.  Much progress has been made, including the following achievements:

Exciting interoperability and performance results: Participants were able to simultaneously demonstrate interoperability of their products while creating a lossless Ethernet fabric.  These results were impressive, given the number of vendors present and the fact that many of them were participating for the first time.

First time testing of Quality Congestion Notification (QCN): The plugfests were also the first time the industry has come together for interoperability testing of QCN.  QCN is an important element of DCB and Enhanced Ethernet.  I’ll discuss its role in a later blog.

Converged Network Testing: The purpose of DCB is to enable the converged Ethernet network.  Such a network has to run many different applications while respecting and maintaining the different traffic properties these applications require.  At previous plugfests, manufacturers had been able to verify both FCoE and iSCSI capabilities.  This time, participants also showed how DCB provides a robust and efficient foundation for high performance computing (HPC) running RDMA and iWARP.  I’ll discuss RDMA in a later blog as well.

DCB is well on track to serving as the underlying technology that consolidates the data center through a single, converged network.  The encouraging results of these plugfests, as well as the increasing support of industry leaders, continues to demonstrate the improving maturity of DCB-enabled Ethernet networks.

Next time I’ll discuss the impact of DCB and these plugfests on the industry as a whole.