Computerworld - Dell will offer Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) network interface cards in its enterprise servers. The move by the world's largest server provider may help bolster adoption of the nascent data transport protocol in enterprise data centers.
Dell is embedding QLogic Corp.'s 8100 Series converged network adapters (CNAs) in a range of Dell PowerEdge servers. The servers include the new PowerEdge R610 and R710 rack servers, T610 and T710 tower servers and the M610 and M710 blade servers.
QLogic's FCoE converged network adapters are already shipping in IBM servers and Cisco switches, as well as in storage arrays from NetApp and EMC.
"Dell's putting their enterprise weight behind FCoE," said Amit Vashi, vice president of marketing for QLogic's Host Solutions Group. "So all the horses have now lined up at the starting gate. Now server customers are seeing FCoE on their price sheets."
Dell will be including both QLogic's QLE8152 10Gbit/sec FCoE PCIe Dual Port Adapter and its QME8142 10Gbit/sec FCoE Dual Port Adapter.
The delivery by Intel of the Nehalem-EX chip will enable the deployment of production virtual servers with very high I/O rates, which can take advantage of the added throughput 10Gbit/sec Ethernet will provide, according to Vashi.
For example, a network administrator could carve up a 10Gbit/sec Ethernet port so that 6Gbit/sec of bandwidth is dedicated to traditional Ethernet file transfers and 4Gbit/sec is allocated to high-speed storage traffic. Currently, the Fibre Channel protocol is shipping with 4Gbit/sec hardware.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet directly maps the Fibre Channel protocol over Ethernet, bypassing the TCP/IP stack and enabling storage area network traffic to be natively transported over a standard LAN. At the same time, companies can continue using their existing Fibre Channel infrastructure.
Internet SCSI (iSCSI), another protocol that, like FCoE, allows block-level storage traffic to be transmitted over Ethernet, was once considered a likely candidate for enterprise storage traffic. But, since the specification was ratified in 2002, it has mostly been deployed by small-to-medium size companies and enterprises seeking to consolidate large Wintel server farms.
Vashi said he believes the second half of 2010 will mark the beginning of strong uptake in adoption of FCoE because of the adoption of the technology by server, storage and networking vendors alike. FCoE CNA revenue has doubled annually and by 2013, FCoE will be a $400 million market, according to the Del Oro Group.
"Right now is like what Fibre Channel was 10 years ago or Ethernet years before that," Vashi said. "It's a technology inflection point. We've made announcements with EMC, NetApp, IBM and some other vendor announcements will be forth coming."
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