Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is the new standard for connection storage devices. The FCoE standard is backed by Cisco, EMC, Emulex, Finisar, HP, IBM, Intel, Hitachi Data Systems, Mellanox, Sun Microsystems and many more.
FCoE is designed to be an evolutional next step for Fiber Channel (FC) with the purpose to solve the following problems:
- Speed: The network speed of Ethernet networks has been increasing at a much higher speed than FC networks, so by moving to Ethernet, the storage devices can take advantage of the Ethernet roadmap.
- Price: As the volume of Ethernet products are 100-1000 times larger than FC products, much lower prices can be achieved by moving from FC to FCoE.
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Power and Price:
By merging IP and FC traffic on the same Ethernet, large server farms can reduce: the number of network adapters needed (in the best cases only half of the network adapters are needed), the cabling, the number of switches and the power consumption per server.
The Napatech adapters support the FCoE standard by being to able to filter, time-stamp and capture FCoE frames at line speed without packet loss.