May 4th, 2009
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Continuing my discussion of the four key testing challenges developers of FCoE network equipment must face, the second challenge is the need for hardware-based protocol tools. With their high throughput and advanced capabilities, FCoE and Enhanced Ethernet technology have created the new need for hardware-based test tools.
Software-based analysis tools already struggling to evaluate Gigabit Ethernet will provide significantly degraded performance at 10 Gb/s. Rather than providing 100% visibility into network interactions, software-based analyzers require developers to pare down what information is collected and made available for offline analysis. Identifying problems is often the most difficult part of troubleshooting, especially when working with new protocols like FCoE with which developers are still becoming familiar. Working with limited information obscures problems and complicates troubleshooting. This is especially true for SAN analysis where it is almost impossible to debug issues using broken or incomplete traces.
Another complication that arises is that all Data Center Bridging (DCB) protocols communicate at the lower data layers, making them inaccessible to software analysis tools. To troubleshoot DCB issues requires hardware-based access in order to guarantee accurate, 100% capture at line-rate. In addition, end node SPAN ports have a limitation of 10 GE because their aggregation mechanism requires higher bandwidth such as 40 GE, a technology which is still under development. Only hardware-based protocol analyzers that guarantee100% line-rate analysis of everything on the wire can effectively capture all the necessary data to facilitate efficient network debugging and troubleshooting.
Posted by Joy Jiang at 11:32 am. Filed under General | Permalink
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