Benefits Of Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE)

By Fibre Channel Industry Association

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is the proposed industry standard being developed by an ecosystem of Fibre Channel and networking product vendors to drive network convergence in the enterprise data center. The technology will map native Fibre Channel traffic onto Ethernet frames, and be capable of benefiting from proposed enhancements to Ethernet. FCoE's Ethernet compatibility will leverage the ubiquity and economics of Ethernet networks while preserving the infrastructure, strengths, and tools of the existing Fibre Channel storage management framework.

FCoE will fully utilize these Ethernet enhancements to provide a transport service that mimics the low latency, lossless characteristics of Fibre Channel fabrics. This evolutionary approach also retains existing SAN management practices through the continued use of the Fibre Channel software stack in the servers.

By encapsulating complete Fibre Channel frames (including checksum, framing bits) directly within the Ethernet payload, FCoE avoids the overhead of any intermediate protocol conversions. This light-weight encapsulation approach also ensures that Fibre Channel forwarders are less compute intensive, enable seamless integration, and thus ensuring high levels of end-to-end performance.