CNBC hopes to fly Fibre Channel on its Ethernet superhighway

Computerworld - DALLAS -- Steve Fastook, vice president of technical and commercial operations at CNBC Inc., could soon have his proverbial back up against a wall as his raised floor has reached its cabling limit. So he's hoping a new technology will allow him to utilize his existing LAN to serve up high-definition video from several large Fibre Channel SANs to more than 200 editing stations.

"Our data center is about 600 racks. Our computer floor is full between the broadcast cabling and data cabling, which is merged now. So anything I can do that leverages the cabling infrastructure is huge for us," Fastook said. "A [rip and] replace would literally be catastrophic for us."

Fastook said the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol, a technology demonstrated here today at Storage Networking World, would foot the bill in combining his large SANs with his extensive Ethernet LAN.

The demonstration of the industry's first converged FCoE network here today combined technologies from QLogic Corp., Network Appliance Inc. and Cisco subsidiary Nuova Systems Inc. The technology demonstration utilized QLogic's so-called converged network adapters, FCoE chip technology from Nuova Systems and storage from Network Appliance (See: ""FCoE: Fibre Channel's last stand?").

"FCoE requires the use of a new class of converged network adapters that appear to the operating system like a Fibre Channel HBA and an Ethernet NIC consolidated into a single adapter," said Jeff Benck, QLogic's president and chief operating officer. The network adapters perform a mapping function that takes the Fibre Channel frames and encapsulates them inside Ethernet packets to be sent out over a LAN.

The FCoE proposed standard has been submitted to the T11 Committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The FCoE standard directly maps the Fibre Channel protocol over Ethernet, bypassing the TCP/IP stack, and enables SAN traffic to be natively transported over standard LAN networks while allowing companies to continue using their existing Fibre Channel infrastructures. (See: ""New Fibre Channel over Ethernet standard proposed").

"With 10Gbit/sec. Ethernet on the horizon, you see performance starting to drive convergence," said Benck. "We see the need for [server] reliability and consolidation. What's that done is driven the need for speed from a storage networking perspective."

Benck predicted that within a few "short years" 10% of SAN ports will be utilizing FCoE. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.-based CNBC may be among the first. Currently, the cable and satellite television business news network uses a 45TB SAN from Thompson Grass Valley to store high-resolution video footage. The SAN fills to capacity every five days and the video must be replicated to a 125TB EMC near-line storage array, where it remains another five days before being backed up to a tape library from ADIC Corp. CNBC maintains a separate 25TB EMC SAN that is connected to the Grass Valley SAN and serves up low-resolution video to more than 200 editing stations.