What is fibre channel over ethernet

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FCoE uses a lossless Ethernet fabric and has its own frame format. It keeps Fiber Channel devices communicating, but need you change the Ethernet link between the devices to a Fibre Channel link. FCoE uses standard Ethernet cards, cables, and switches to handle Fiber Channel traffic at the data link layer, encapsulating, routing, and transporting FC frames from a Fibre Channel switched Ethernet network using Ethernet frames to another device, And use the same switch configuration.

The lossless Ethernet MAC is a full-duplex Ethernet MAC that implements Ethernet extensions to avoid frame loss due to congestion and supports frames of at least bytes. Session does not refer to end-to-end server-to-storage sessions. Figure 1 shows a block diagram of the major ENode components. FCoE supports two frame types, control frames and data frames.

FIP control frames handle FCoE device discovery, initializing communication, and maintaining communication. They do not carry a data payload. FCoE frames include:. Want the complete course? Fantastic course for someone who is already in IT and looking to get involved with storage networks.

The series of three videos are available here:. In the past, companies used ethernet strictly to share information among devices in their networks LAN and they mainly relied on fibre channel for data storage SAN. Both of the traffic passes through the same physical cable but they are still able to be separated on the same hardware. FCoE works exactly the same way as native Fibre Channel.

The difference is that we encapsulate that same FCP traffic inside an Ethernet header so we can run it over an Ethernet network, rather than over a native Fibre Channel network.

FCoE retains the reliability and performance of native Fibre Channel. Quality of Service QoS is used to guarantee the required bandwidth for the storage traffic. It ensures the normal data traffic does not hog too much bandwidth.