Intel made some big news on the networking front this week, specifically around its effort to expand the use of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Yesterday Intel announced that its Open FCoE technology is now being supported by a number of big name vendors, including Cisco, EMC, NetApp, Red Hat and Oracle.
Tom Swinford, Intel’s vice president and general manager of the company’s LAN Access division, said that Intel wants every server that ships with an Intel adapter or with LAN on motherboard (LOM) to be able to support FCoE.
“Our approach is a bit different than other approaches. We’re running all the Fibre Channel protocols on the host, instead of running them on proprietary hardware down on the HBA,” Swinford said at a press conference.
At the core of the Open FCoE effort is the Data Center Bridging (DCB) specification. Swinford said DCB is part of the Linux 2.6.29 kernel and subsequent Linux kernels. According to Intel, there are no special hooks in the kernel for Open FCoE to work with Intel X520 adapters, but Intel adapters are the first ones qualified by EMC and NetApp with the Open FCoE solution.
Enterprise Storage Forum has a full report on the FCoE announcement including comments by Cisco, one of Intel’s key partners.