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FIBRE CHANNEL FOCUS

VOLUME 6 JULY 2010

UPCOMING EVENTS

SNW USA
October 11-14
Dallas, TX

FCoE Plugfest
November 1-5
UNH-IOL, NH

RECENT PRESS RELEASES

FCIA Validates FCoE Robustness in Multi-vendor Interoperable Testing
June 9, 2010

FCIA Sponsors Fibre Channel Leadership at SNW with 8GFC and FCoE Demos
April 12, 2010

RECENT ARTICLES

FCoE I/O Convergence and Virtualization
April 30, 2010
InfoSTOR

 

WELCOME
Lots of standards updates to talk about this quarter! We devote most of this newsletter to all of the exciting updates that came out of this month's T11 meeting. Don't forget to join us for the August T11 meeting... it's the 100th meeting and we have some fun things in store to celebrate!

STEVE'S STANDARDS UPDATE:
There have been many exciting Fibre Channel developments in the Technical Committee T11 over teh past several months. Those include enhancements to the FCoE protocol and the development of the 16G standard for Fibre Channel. In addition, there have been new standards developed in areas such as Simplified Configuration Management, Inter-Fabric Routing, Energy Efficiency, and Switch Architecture. Here are some highlights!
Three important FC standards were recently published:

  • BC-BB-5 defining the FCoE protocol including FIP and FCoE access control functions (completed in record time!)
  • FC-SW-5 containing updates to FC Switching architecture and accommodations for FCoE
  • FC-GS-6 describes updates to FC services including name server, Fabric configuration, and zoning
FC-BB-6 is under development to describe enhancements and new functionality for the FCoE protocol. The group is currently working to merge multiple proposals on both point-to-point and end-to-end configurations.

The FC-PI-5 and FC-FS-3 standards define 16G Fibre Channel. T11 is currently putting the final touches on FC-PI-5 and it will be forwarded to INCITS for further processing and publication in the very near future. FC-FS-3 is already being processed by INCITS and will soon become a published standard These standards define the 16g architecture and describe how the negotiation takes place between the 8B/10B and 64B/66B encoding schemes. This negotiation is the key to providing backward compatibility with the prior Base2 speeds specified by the FCIA Fibre Channel Roadmap.

T11 is continuing to develop all aspects of Fibre Channel to protect customer investment and bring Fibre Channel based solutions into new markets. These advances include higher speeds, advanced protocols, energy efficiency, and FCoE refinements.

Here are some specific examples. The FC-PI-6 project is being proposed in June 2010 to define 32G Fibre Channel. The FC-SW-6 project is being proposed in June to define additional Fibre Channel Switch functions to support advanced Fabric topologies. These include support for Fibre Channel Fabric and FCoE integration, and the possible extension of FSPF for distributed FC Forwarding topologies. On the management side the FC-GS-7 project has been created to provide Fiber Channel service enhancements for FCoE and Fibre Channel Fabric environments.

T11 has also accepted the task of defining requirements for energy efficient Fiber Channel to address the green aspects of data center design and implementation. This effort will likely result in one or more additional Fibre Channel projects being created in the next few months.

And remember, you can always access the latest T11 information at www.t11.org.

TELL YOUR FAVORITE FI BRE CHANNEL STORY
Because this marks the 100th meeting of the T11 in August, we wanted you to tell your favorite moment in Fibre Channel. We plan to have a recorder there and the best stories submitted to the team for review will have a chance to tell their story via podcast for posting on the FCIA web site. Submit your stories to Alice by July 15th and we'll tell stories at the reception on August 4th!

EVENTS:
The summer heat is on and the fall trade show season is not far away!

SNW Fall 2010
FCIA is getting ready to attend Storage Networking World Spring 2010 .

FCoE Plugfest
Ready for the next FCoE Plugfest? Come to UNH November 1-5. Participation is open to both FCIA members and non-members, but an NDA is required from all participating companies. Register today or find out more information!
© 2010 Fibre Channel Industry Association