next-best-transport! down with ethernet!

Tue Jan 3 08:40:07 UTC 2012

On Friday, December 30, 2011 05:58:38 PM Vitkovsky, Adam 
wrote:

> Actually an a Cisco presentation on Nexus 7k I asked
> whether it's possible to transport the FCoE over let's
> say EoMPLS or VPLS and did not get a straight answer
> though that was half a year ago -but it would be really
> cool to connect hard-drives directly over continents

We looked at doing this back in 2010, and the problems are 
still the same - synchronous replications (which is the 
majority of your garden-variety fibre channel deployments) 
are very sensitive to latency and low bandwidth, and don't 
generally tend to exist outside the data centre or short-
distance DWDM fibre channel networks.

FCIP was the solution proposed for extending SAN's over IP 
(which invariably means over MPLS as well). But FCIP tends 
to work best with asynchronous replications, which is the 
only way to get around higher latency and lower bandwidth 
network properties.

I know Brocade and Cisco both have boxes that support FCIP.

I did come across a vendor, Orckit-Corrigent - 
http://www.orckit.com/ - that claimed they support FCoMPLS 
(I forget what their exact solution was, but it had to do 
with some buffering trickery if memory serves), but we 
didn't get a chance to test these as FCoDWDM ending up 
winning anyway. Come to think of it, maybe their solution 
was FCIP inside MPLS :-).

Cheers,

Mark.
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