Data Center Power

Intel Hopes to Initiate Data Center Networking Using FCoE Stack

By Jamie Epstein TMCnet Web Editor

In order for Intel to push data centers to transition to a single networking infrastructure, the company is giving away its Fiber Channel over Ethernet software stack.

Intel officials announced at an event on January 27 that it will now now offer its Open FCoE software as a free upgrade- to the company’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet Server Adapter X520 lineup. Support of this idea is coming from all angles including operating system companies Microsoft (News - Alert) and Red Hat, enterprise software maker Oracle, hardware vendor Dell, storage vendors EMC and NetApp, and networking companies Cisco Systems and Brocade Communications Systems (News - Alert).

Currently at data centers, virtualization, unified computing and cloud computing are expanding at a rapid speed. Because of this, businesses are being forced to look for new ways to reduce costs, while at the same time increasing efficiency and productivity in their facilities.

FCoE allows IT staffs to be accessible to many great advantages through use of the Fiber Channel mainly because of its consistent reliability – and Ethernet wide data center presence, Intel said. Consolidating these two specific data and storage networks onto a single 10GbE network will greatly deduce global IT spending by an estimated $3 billion a year, as well as cut cabling in data centers worldwide by 400 million feet, according to Intel.

Intel announced its Cloud 2015 and Open Data Center strategies in October, and the idea of the FCoE Stack works hand-in-hand with this strategy.

“What’s frustrating for IT managers is that most of the data center dollars are spent on infrastructure costs, not on innovation,” Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, said in a statement. “Expanding Intel Ethernet to include Open FCoE will help simplify the network and drive more of the IT budget toward innovation. We think IT departments can lower infrastructure costs by 29 percent, reduce power by almost 50 percent and cut cable costs by 80 percent by moving to a unified network.”

Intel officials said they had been working on the production of the Open FCoE software stack now for several months, as well as working to compile ideas with the Linux community, and IEEE (News - Alert) Data Center Bridging standards group.

Intel officials went on to explain that Open FCoE will have the capabilities to replace up to 10 1GbE connections in a single server and two fiber channel connections. It also cuts down on the number of adapters needed in the network because it puts most of the processing for FCoE connections onto the server chips rather than within the adapters, Intel said.

Cisco’s (News - Alert) Nexus 10GbE switches and its UCS (unified computing system) servers both support Intel’s Open FCoE adapters, according to Soni Jiandani, vice president of marketing for Cisco’s Server Access and Virtualization Technology Group.“A unified fabric supports both compute and storage resources over a high-bandwidth transport to deliver greater data center efficiency, simplify management and can accelerate the deployment of virtualization and cloud-based services,” Jiandani said in a statement.