The dark horse in data centre I/O simplification
Comment Data centre I/O needs simplifying, everyone is agreed.
There are reckoned to be two candidates; datacentre Ethernet (DCE) which Cisco and Brocade support, and InfiniBand, pushed by Voltaire and Mellanox. Both DCE and InfiniBand virtualize I/O by having other network protocols run inside their fat pipes. But there is a third fat pipe that can be used and it does not require every server to have an expensive fat pipe adapter. Think PCIe. Hold that thought and read on.
Data centres have servers, storage boxes and networking resources. Servers are getting virtualized, racked and bladed. The net effect is that a rack of physical servers which are virtualized can have two I/O adapters per server. There can be Ethernet NICs and Fibre Channel HBAs. The storage area network (SAN) fabric is expensive and complex with tiers of switches and directors linking storage arrays to accessing servers. By taking the Fibre Channel protocol and layering it on Ethernet (FCoE) the separate Fibre Channel fabric can be ditched and Ethernet used as a common transport.
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