April 27th, 2009
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As I discussed last time, developers of FCoE network equipment face four key challenges when verifying equipment behavior, performance, and responsiveness. The first challenge is working with the multi-protocol nature of FCoE.
As a converged network technology, FCoE involves significantly more than simply implementing a new protocol. Because the FCoE network connects the FC SAN to the Ethernet network, the entire network is effectively involved in the mixed transportation of protocols. Developers must perform end-to-end analysis of mixed data across 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel links to ensure that these protocols are handled properly, accurately, quickly, and reliability.
To achieve this, developers must be able to capture and analyze multiple protocols at the same time. Note that the list of possible protocols involved may be quite large – FCoE, FC, Enhanced Ethernet, iSCSI, etc. – and that problems may arise at any transition, cross over, or end point. Test setups which can only monitor a few protocols due to the limitation of available interfaces prevent developers from comprehensively evaluating and testing FCoE capabilities on real-world FCoE network topologies.
Another critical element of multi-protocol analysis is the ability to accurately timestamp packets and frames. Unless traffic from different protocols can be correlated within the same time domain, developers will have great difficulty in tracking particular exchanges as they cross protocol domains. Without this capability, developers will be severely curtailed in their ability to perform multi-protocol FCoE analysis.
Posted by Joy Jiang at 6:49 pm. Filed under General | Permalink
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