News

posted on 14 May 2008 15:41

Brocade appears to be developing an FCoE adapter.

When talking about the characteristics of yesterday's new 8Gbit/s HBAs, Brocade spokesperson Simon Pamplin discussed how they differed from Emulex and QLogic HBAs, saying:  "Emulex and QLogic use the (Cisco) Nuova ASIC which has no virtual channel capability."

The channel virtualization capibility is related to NICs and has nothing to do with Fibre Channel HBAs (Host Bus Adapters). My information is that this Nuova ASIC is not relevant to the HBA market but is relevant to carrying Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) traffic. In other words a standard Ethernet network interface card (NIC) might use it to add FCoE capability and be transformed into a Converged Network Adapter (CNA), converging traditional LAN traffic and Fibre Channel traffic to a SAN (storage area network).

It appears then, that Brocade is developng its own CNA which may well offer a virtual channel capability so that virtual machines in a physical server can have defined qualities of SAN access service which move with them if they move from NIC to NIC or from physical server to physical server.

Brocade is supportive of FCoE, saying it has a role to play in its Data Center Fabric (DCF) scheme. The DCX Data Center Switch will support FCoE.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}