October 17th, 2008

Plugging Away At FCoE Interoperability

Last month the industry’s leading Fibre Channel vendors came together at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL) to complete interoperability testing for up and coming FCoE products and solutions. Device and storage system manufacturers participating in the FCoE Plugfest included Amphenol, Brocade, Cisco Systems, Emulex, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel Corp, LSI, Mellanox Technologies, Molex, NetApp, and QLogic Corporation. The Plugfest was sponsored by the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA).

Finisar was a proud participant at the Plugfest, bringing a team of 9 engineers including development engineers, protocol experts, and networking experts to assist in interoperability testing using three of Finisar’s Xgig 10GE, 8G Fibre Channel Analyzers and Medusa Labs Test Tool Suite. (More details outlining Xgig’s complete lineup of protocol-aware FCoE monitoring and analysis capabilities, including full-rate Traffic Generation, will be announced later this month.)

Finisar was literally in the middle of the Plugfest, sitting between test units as it monitored links and provided real-time results for every single interoperability test performed. From our unique position, we watched as every FCoE initiator was found capable of communicating across the FCoE switches to both FCoE and Fibre Channel targets. As participants ran into issues, they were able to fully characterize root causes and conduct on-site troubleshooting with the help of our protocol experts. With this information, they could apply quick fixes and proceed to the next level of testing.

The outstanding success of the Plugfest, with vendors achieving interoperability across a great many configurations, is exciting. It represents another milestone towards the development and verification of the stability and interoperability of multi-vendor FCoE-based networks. Clearly, the momentum behind FCoE is significant, as the results of the Plugfest show. Such a high level of commitment from key Fibre Channel vendors will lead to rapid product availability and subsequent deployment as the standard continues its transformation from a paper spec to physical reality.
Some results from the Plugfest:

FCIA: http://www.fibrechannel.org/NEWS/fcia080929.html

Finisar: http://investor.finisar.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=334685

Emulex: http://www.emulex.com/press/2008/0923-01.jsp

QLogic Corporation: http://biz.yahoo.com/pz/080922/150776.html

Posted by Joy Jiang at 3:12 pm. Filed under General | Permalink
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